My father was not, by disposition, a man given to cinema. He was a man of duty, of law, of the careful daily life of a professional, and the films we watched together were rare — chosen with deliberation. When Life Is Beautiful arrived in our home, it was on his recommendation.
The One Film I Would Watch Again for the First Time
On Life Is Beautiful — and the companion who made the first viewing what it was
A note on this post: today’s WordPress Daily Writing Prompt asks, “If you could erase one movie from your memory and watch it again for the first time, which one would it be?” What follows is a considered answer — and, by the nature of the question, a personal one.
The Question Itself
There is a particular kind of question that arrives looking innocent and turns out to be heavier than it seemed. This is one of them. To wish a film back into the state of first viewing is, on examination, to wish for two things at once. It is to wish for the film as one had never seen it before. But it is also, almost always, to wish for the surroundings of that first viewing — the place, the time, the company, the version of oneself that one was on that evening. A first viewing is never only a viewing. It is a moment located in a life, and the moment cannot be recovered by reseeing the film alone.
This is why the prompt produces, on reflection, a different answer than it first invites. The instinct is to choose the greatest film one has ever seen, or the one whose surprise has been most thoroughly spent by subsequent viewings. But the truer answer is the one that names the moment, not only the film — the evening when the film and the life around it became, briefly, a single experience. For me, that film is Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, and the company in which it was first watched was my father.
The First Viewing
My father was not, by disposition, a man given to cinema. He was a man of duty, of law, of the careful daily life of a professional, and the films we watched together were rare — chosen with deliberation, not casually selected. When Life Is Beautiful arrived in our home, some years after its release, it was on his recommendation. He had heard of it through one of those quiet channels by which the older generation, before streaming and algorithms, learned that a particular film was worth setting an evening aside for.
The opening half of the film is so disarmingly light that, for a long while, one wonders what the great reputation is about. Guido — Benigni’s character — is a young Jewish man in pre-war Italy, full of comedy and improvisation and slightly absurd courtship, falling in love with a schoolteacher named Dora. The film moves like a romantic farce. There is slapstick. There is misdirection. There is the kind of warm, sunlit Italian comedy that Hollywood spent decades trying and failing to replicate.
I remember glancing at my father once or twice during this opening section, half wondering whether he was enjoying it as much as I was, half wondering whether the film would justify the time he had set aside. He was watching it carefully, as he watched most things. He did not laugh easily, but he was attentive. I recall thinking that I had perhaps misjudged the kind of film he had recommended.
And then the film turns. The second half moves to a Nazi concentration camp. Guido and his small son, Giosuè, are taken there. Dora, who is not Jewish, insists on being taken with them. And the film becomes — without warning, and without ever abandoning its warmth — one of the most morally serious works of cinema produced in the twentieth century. The whole architecture of the comic opening reveals itself, in retrospect, as the necessary preparation for what the father will now have to do. To preserve his son’s innocence inside the camp, Guido must convince him that everything happening around them is an elaborate game, a competition with a prize at the end. He plays the part of a man for whom this fiction is true, and he plays it to the very last.
There is a moment, near the end of the film, when Guido is being marched to his death by a guard, and he passes the place where his son is hiding. He sees the boy. He cannot speak. So he walks, instead, in an exaggerated, comic, soldier’s march — making one last performance of the game, so that the boy will not realise what is happening. It is one of the most extraordinary moments I have ever seen on a screen.
The Silence in the Room
When the film ended, neither of us spoke for a long time. This was unusual. My father was not a man given to extended silences in the family room; there was usually a small comment, a closing observation, a return to ordinary life. That evening, there was nothing. The credits ran. He did not move. I did not move. After some time, he stood up, said something quietly that I no longer remember exactly — something about the film being worth what he had heard about it — and went to his room.
It is one of the few silences of my early adulthood that I remember in any detail. It was not awkward. It was not grief. It was something closer to the silence that follows a serious religious service — the silence of two people who have been brought, briefly and unexpectedly, into the presence of something they had not been prepared for, and who do not yet know how to speak about it.
I understood, even then, that what had moved my father was not only the film. He was a father himself, and the film had asked him, without quite asking, what he would do for his children if the circumstances ever required it of him. He had answered the question in his own life, in the long quiet way that Indian fathers of his generation answered such questions — through providence and labour and the patient construction of a life within which his children could become themselves. The film had simply named, in extraordinary form, the work he had already been doing for years.
Why This Is the Viewing I Would Want Back
The wish to watch this film again for the first time is not, in the end, a wish about the film. The film has been re-watched since, more than once, and each subsequent viewing has only confirmed the greatness of the first. The structure, the performances, the moral weight of the closing sequence — these survive every revisiting. The film does not require the first-viewing magic to retain its power. It would survive a hundred re-watchings.
What does not survive is the room in which it was first seen. My father is no longer present in that room. The chair where he sat is occupied differently now. The quality of silence that filled the house after the credits ended cannot be reproduced. The version of myself who watched the film alongside him — younger, less burdened, with the assumption that there would always be more evenings like that one — was a version that no later viewing can return me to.
If the memory could be erased and the first viewing restored, what would be restored is not only the film’s surprise. It would be the surrounding evening — the recommendation made by my father in the careful, measured way he made recommendations; the small adjustments of attention as the film began; the slow recognition, somewhere in the second half, that he was being moved as deeply as I was; the silence after the credits; the goodnight that followed. These are the irreplaceable parts. The film I can rewatch. The evening I cannot.
A Closing Reflection
There is a small principle here, worth carrying away from a question that looked at first like a piece of light entertainment. The greatest films of our lives are not, usually, great by themselves. They are great because they arrived in a particular room, on a particular evening, in the company of a particular person, and because the film and the company and the moment combined into something that none of the three could have produced alone.
This is why the wish to watch a film again for the first time is, when examined closely, a wish for the company we were keeping when we first saw it. Cinema is, more than most arts, a shared experience. The film flickers in a darkened room and we sit beside other lives, and what we remember decades later is not only the screen but the shoulder next to us in the dark.
My father has been gone for some time now. The chair is differently occupied. But Life Is Beautiful remains the film I would, if such a thing were possible, watch again for the first time — not to recover the film, which I have not lost, but to recover the evening, which I have. And in writing this, I find that something of the evening has, in fact, been recovered — not by the wishing, but by the remembering.
The films we love most are rarely loved alone. They are loved alongside a particular person, in a particular room, on a particular evening that we did not know, at the time, would become the thing we most wished to keep.
If there is a small consolation buried in the prompt itself, it is this: the irreversibility of first viewings is not a loss to be lamented. It is the proof that some experiences were given to us once, in a specific moment, and were meant to be held there. To wish them back is natural. To honour them, by remembering them carefully, is more than enough.
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What about you?
Is there a film you would wish back into first viewing — and, if you look closely, is the wish really about the film, or about the company in which you first saw it?
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