Lamerica Gianni Amelio is an Italian director whose new film "Lamerica" opened recently in New York. I saw it the other night and recommend it strongly. The film's prologue, shown during the opening credits, is an old Mussolini-era newsreel showing the Albanian people "welcoming" the Italian occupation of their country. The newsreel states that the fascists are bringing "civilization" to a backward people. In the opening scene, two Italian "businessmen" show up in Albania immediately after the fall of Hoxha in order to start a shoe factory. They are scam artists basically. Their intention is to receive investment funds from the Italian government, but spend none of it on shoe production. The older of the two men pulled the same scam in Nigeria ten years earlier. Albania at this point is in an advanced stage of social and economic disintegration and the Italians want to pick up a fast buck. The two well-dressed yuppified businessman/thieves are racist toward every Albanian they meet. They clearly represent an updated version of the invading forces of Mussolini. In order for the scam to work, they need formal Albanian management of the firm. So they look for the most pliable and obedient Albanian they can find. He turns up in a former slave-labor camp in the person of a seventy year old miner named Spiro. He is covered from head to toe in coal-dust and is in a state of total confusion. When asked how old he is, the miner holds up his fingers to indicate twenty years old. The Italians are confident that they have found exactly the right man to act as a puppet to run their new company. There's only one problem. The old man doesn't want to run a company. He says to the younger Italian, whose job it is to keep track of the old man, that he simply "wants to go home." Home, it turns out, is actually Sicily. The old man is not Albanian at all. He is a deserter from the Italian army who fled to Albania in the 1930's. After the fall of Mussolini, Hoxha's police swept up all Italians and threw them into prison camps no matter what their politics were. The old Sicilian eventually eludes the Italians and hops a train into the Albanian countryside. The younger Italian jumps into a Suzuki jeep in order to find the old man and haul him back to Tirana. The young man tracks down the Sicilian in a remote village. After leaving the Suzuki momentarily to fetch the old man, he returns only to discover that tires have been stolen. Thus begins the spiritual and social journey of the two Italians. They board a series of trucks, trains and buses in order to return to Tirana. They witness the desperate attempt of Albanians to flee into Italy, which represents a "promised land" to them. For years they've watched Italian television and have faith that every Italian lives the good life. The young businessman tries to dash the hopes of the penniless Albanians who surround him. The only job you'll find in Italy, he spits out, is as a dishwasher. He, it turns out, is a Sicilian himself. In the course of his travels with the old man, he loses his passport and is forced to trade his fancy clothes for the ragged clothing of an Albanian, among other misfortunes. Eventually, his identity becomes much more like the old man's. The director is telling his Italian audience that they are not so far removed from the world of their fathers. Italians and Albanians are basically in the same boat. They are at the mercy of economic forces that conspire to destroy their lives and force them into pitiful emigrations to hostile lands. "Lamerica", the title of the film, is Sicilian vernacular for America. Amelio tells this story in a spare, neo-neorealist style. This film is probably the most devastating comment on the brutal aftermath of the fall of "Communism". One of the Albanians in the film actually says, "We had it better under Hoxha." But the film is not just about the dislocations felt in places like Albania. We get the strong sense that all of Europe is susceptible to the same kinds of insecurity and ruin. The film suggests some of the powerful economic and social pressures that led to the civil war in former Yugoslavia. Political film-making seems alive and well in Italy. |