'SOMEONE ELSE'S AMERICA': HEARTWARMING SWEETNESS

   Forget Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon as a grumpy old odd couple. When
it comes to conveying a bumptious charm, Tom Conti and Miki Manojlovic
outdo them playing grumpy middle-aged neighbors who live in a shabby
corner of Brooklyn. 


  These two marvelous actors with their sad-clown faces infuse Goran
Paskaljevic's film "Someone Else's America" with enough soulfulness to
lend a crude modern fairy tale about immigrants pursuing the American
Dream a heartwarming sweetness. If you think your being a United States
citizen is a raw deal, go see "Someone Else's America." 

  It might change your mind. 

  And leave it for other directors to portray the urban melting pot as a
seething Darwinian cauldron of vicious ethnic rivalries. In "Someone
Else's America," Paskaljevic, who was born in Belgrade, imagines a
multi-ethnic neighborhood that has its tensions but is fueled by an
underlying optimism and a shared sense of struggle. In this interpretation
of the immigrant experience, America is still a land of endless
opportunity, and New York a shining Emerald City. 

  Conti plays Alonso, a Spaniard who owns a seedy neighborhood bar, the
Paradiso, where his best friend, Bayo ( Manojlovic), an illegal immigrant
from the former Yugoslavia, lives free in exchange for taking care of the
place. 

  Although Alonso and Bayo are continually bickering, they are loyal to
one another when it really counts. When Alonso fancies a beautiful Syrian
woman who lives in the neighborhood, Bayo becomes his romantic advocate
and gets beaten up for his trouble. But he doesn't hold it against his
friend. 


  The heart of the movie is the drama surrounding the circuitous journey
to America from Montenegro by Bayo's mother, Anja (Zorka Manojlovic,
Manojlovic's mother), and his three children from a wife who has left him. 

  Having not heard from her son, whose letters and money from America
never reached her, Anja arranges without Bayo's knowledge to bring the
family to America via Mexico. As their party crosses the Rio Grande on
ropes, a musical instrument belonging to Bayo's youngest son, Pepo, slips
away in the water. As the little boy, who was his father's favorite, tries
to retrieve it, he is swept downstream. 

  Traveling to Texas with Alonso at his side, Bayo refuses to believe that
his hardy younger son who played the accordion so sweetly is really gone,
and he conducts a long, fruitless search for the child. 

  Manojlovic vents Bayo's raging grief with such eruptive force that it is
impossible not to be touched. 

  Bayo irrationally blames his eldest son, Luka (Sergej Trifunovic), for
the loss. A wily hustler destined to make it big in America, Luka is
wounded but far from devastated by his father's anger. 

  He turns Alonso's bar into a successful little restaurant built around
his grandmother's Old World cooking and obtains his green card by marrying
a Chinese-American woman from the neighborhood. The wedding party, with
its flamenco-style dancing, Chinese finery and Slavic food is an amusingly
off-kilter exercise in intercultural cooperation. 

  "Someone Else's America" doesn't pretend to be a journalistically
accurate portrayal of immigrants struggling to gain a foothold. Perhaps
because the director comes from a land that has recently been shattered by
ethnic pride and intolerance, much of the movie has the atmosphere of a
wishful dream. 


  That atmosphere is enriched with fanciful magic-realist touches. When
Alonso's blind, ailing mother insists on returning to the town in Spain
where she grew up, he finds a way of transporting her there. He brings a
goat into the courtyard and constructs a rough replica of a well she
remembers. 

  One day when she wakes up after a long nap, he informs her that they are
back in the ancestral village where she grew up. To prove it, he has her
touch the stones of the well. But what about the city traffic noises she
hears, she asks? She only hears New York in her brain, he says soothingly.
She believes him, and a peaceful smile crosses her face. 

  "Someone Else's America" understands that whatever we recognize as home
is finally a dream.