I am not a fan of writer-director-actor Roberto Genigni. Writer-Genigni and director-Genigni are the best of partners in seeing actor-Genigni get plenty of room to display his exaggerated brand of humour, which is not particularly inspiring. His world-renounced "Life is beautiful" has been grossly overrated, testifying only to how easily can people be manipulated by contrivances on the screen.
"The tiger and the snow" is light-weight, trivial and expendable. It's essentially a frivolous courtship story which Genigni tries to pad with a contemporary backdrop of the Iranian War. The end result is "neither here nor there", "anything goes" or half a dozen platitudes that you care to describe it with. The surreal twist is nonsensical, shallow and contrived something pretending to be clever, sort of an inferior version of the emperor's new clothes.
To be fair, not everything about this movie is negative. There are several scenes and sketches that are quite funny, but they just don't add up to a good movie. As well, while Genigni is a bore to watch (well, after the first 3 minutes, if you insist), his wife Nicolette Braschi is charming. The only place where a good chord is really struck is Genigni's character's arrival in Baghdad finding Braschi's character in a coma, but refusing to acknowledge that she is beyond hope. But then, one sparrow doesn't make a spring, nor does it matter whether the tiger is in the snow.
"The tiger and the snow" is light-weight, trivial and expendable. It's essentially a frivolous courtship story which Genigni tries to pad with a contemporary backdrop of the Iranian War. The end result is "neither here nor there", "anything goes" or half a dozen platitudes that you care to describe it with. The surreal twist is nonsensical, shallow and contrived something pretending to be clever, sort of an inferior version of the emperor's new clothes.
To be fair, not everything about this movie is negative. There are several scenes and sketches that are quite funny, but they just don't add up to a good movie. As well, while Genigni is a bore to watch (well, after the first 3 minutes, if you insist), his wife Nicolette Braschi is charming. The only place where a good chord is really struck is Genigni's character's arrival in Baghdad finding Braschi's character in a coma, but refusing to acknowledge that she is beyond hope. But then, one sparrow doesn't make a spring, nor does it matter whether the tiger is in the snow.