Lamerica Review by John Simon

National Review, February 12, 1996

Before Bosnia, the most wretched Balkan country was Albania. For the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha, even Soviet Russia was too liberal; only Mao would do. But the miseries of this tiny, three-million-soul country go further back. In 1939, Mussolini's troops crossed the seventy miles of Adriatic Sea to rule Albania until 1943, when the Nazis took over. Under today's quasi-democracy, the country is still horribly poor. It reminded the filmmaker Gianni Amelio (Open Doors, Stolen Children) of that immediately postwar Italy that forced his grandfather to emigrate to Lamerica, as illiterate Italians refer to the United States, where he promptly failed.

Lamerica, Amelio's new film, is dedicated to all poor nations whose paupers dream of distant salvation in a mythical America, but either can't afford to leave or, like most Albanians who swarmed to Italy after the dictator's fall, are sent back on the very ships they came on. Equally tragic were the Italian soldiers who, upon the Duce's fall, changed their names, became Albanianized, and still ended up in inhuman Albanian prisons, where many of them died.

The film takes place in 1991, when two Italian con men, Fiore and young Gino, arrive in Albania to set up a bogus shoe factory, collect subsidies from Italy, and then scamper off. They need an Albanian figurehead to ostensibly run the company, and look for some abject fellow they can boss around. They find Spiro, a poor wretch in his seventies who languished in jail for decades and is too scared even to speak, and make him president. They clean him up, provide him with a decent suit that somehow refuses to hang right on him, and temporarily park him in an orphanage run by nuns. But Spiro escapes, and Gino in his jeep sets out to retrieve him.

He finally catches him, and they head back for Tirana, the capital. Along the way, every removable part of the jeep is stolen. Next, Gino's baggage and clothes; he even lands briefly in prison. Spiro, however, refuses to talk, even though it emerges that he is, like Gino, a Sicilian -- Michele, a soldier who left a wife and child back home. A half-century hiatus has befuddled his mind, just as greed and impotent rage at Spiro and the depredations of the starving Albanians have clouded Gino's. Meanwhile Fiore, unmasked by the authorities, has fled back to Italy, and the scam is dead. Gino is left hanging with a quirky and useless old man on his hands.

But Spiro-Michele now becomes friendly and communicative, and harder for Gino to dump. He tries to do it kindly, but it's no go; the two are stuck together until Spiro escapes again. Separately, though, both he and Gino are headed for the coast and for Italy. En route, as Gino becomes poorer and poorer, he mingles with fleeing Albanian youths on an overcrowded truck, and his world view begins to change. The very landscape, stark and crisscrossed by escapees and police, is a stern teacher. Yet the insipidities broadcast by Italian television seduce the Albanians into believing paradise awaits them across the water. Heartrendingly, Gino watches a little girl doing a frenzied dance she copied from Italian TV as her mother approaches him with the chilling suggestion that he take her child to Italy with him. Like so much in Lamerica, this actually happened; as it was being shot, the film kept incorporating real-life incidents into its screenplay.

Many things contribute to Lamerica's potency. A terrible irony hovers over the goings-on. Frustration for every character -- for the whole country -- is everywhere, even hunger and death. Yet the horrors tend to wear a comic face. Whatever goes wrenchingly wrong is somehow also comic in its absurdity, its perverse contrariness, bureaucratic or existential. But misfortune's grinning mask is more appalling than outright horror; as a genuine skull would be, posturing as a Halloween pumpkin.

In its final sequences, Lamerica becomes incandescently moving. Even then, this rigorously unsentimental film does not milk your tear ducts, however much it grips your heart and tightens your throat. From a screenplay partly by himself, Amelio has directed with his masterly trademark dryness. Yet it is not the soul that is dry, but the humor and the anger as suffering humanity is depicted in its shattered and audience-shattering essentials.

Michele Placido expertly balances the charm and menace of the charlatan Fiore; Enrico Lo Verso makes the transformation of the brash scoundrel Gino into a human being subtly gradual to the point of near-imperceptibility. Spiro-Michele is played by Carmelo di Mazzarelli, found by Amelio in the streets of a small Sicilian town where he had previously filmed. He lends the movie his bare-bones, no-frills presence, something few trained actors could have matched. Without imitating them, Lamerica transports us into the world of such masterworks as Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. It covers the enormous distance between despair and (probably unfounded) hope in less than two hours, but with enough insight to last you a lifetime.

COPYRIGHT 1996 National Review, Inc.