Someone Else's America

This Euro pudding film, made by a Belgrade-born director, finds a corner of low-rent New York that is forever the Old Country. In the backyard of Brooklyn's Paradiso bar, the blind mother of the Spanish owner, Alonso, draws water each morning from a well and milks the goat. When the family of Montenegran odd-job man Bayo eventually gains illegal entry to the US, his mum isn't so immediately at home, but ne'er-do-well eldest boy Luka gets right into the enterprise spirit and starts creating a future everyone can build on. This sentimental, deeply unpersuasive look at the immigrant's lot, dies virtually the minute Conti ambles on as Alonso, reprising his caricature Greek fisherman from Shirley Valentine. Almost as bad is the Brooklyn backdrop rigged up in a Hamburg studio, which resembles nothing so much as a set for Sesame Street.