Books, Arts & Manners: People, Politics, and Perversity

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.

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John Simon

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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.