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Face to Face with Albania
Lamerica, written and directed by Gianni Amelio, October 11-17 at The Varsity

reviews by Paul D. Goetz
Free Press staff writer


Long-suffering Albania is the setting of Amelio's extraordinary new foray into social realism. Like his previous films, Amelio uses mostly non-actors, a minimum of visual braggadocio, and a sensitivity for the authenticity of place, all of which heighten the sense of realism. Despite many ironies and metaphorical details, Lamerica often maintains the feeling that we are eavesdropping on reality. Additionally, the affinity we feel for Amelio's characters is profound because he draws inextricable connection between personal detail and epic perspective.

Lamerica opens with Italian newsreel footage from 1939 that sought to put a positive spin on the invasion that made Albania a World War II Italian military outpost. Following the war, Albania suffered for nearly half of a century at the hands of Enver Hoxha and his totalitarian Communist regime, one of the most brutal in the world, and Lamerica quickly shifts to post-Hoxha 1991, putting viewers face to face with a nation of begging children and desperate multitudes swarming the roads to ports where they eagerly hope to evade the still-repressive military police. Ironically, their desire is to escape to Italy, a country they've come to perceive through Italian television as a kind of paradise of opportunity.
Into this chaotic crisis of identity comes an imperious pair of Italian con men who consider the Albanians to be little more than spoiled children. They are planning to steal Italian aid by setting up a phony Italo-Albanian shoe factory as a conduit. To do so they need a native Albanian figurehead to act as company chairman who they find in Spiro Tozai, an elderly, stuporous shell of a man who has spent decades in a forced-labor camp (played with great sensitivity by 80-year-old non-actor Carmelo Di Mazzarelli). Tozai believes that he's still 20-years-old and that his wife and young child are still awaiting his return in Sicily. Is Tozai, then, Albanian or Italian? Was he one of the many Italian servicemen who falsified papers to escape execution when Hoxha came to power after the war?
Gino, the younger of the two "businessmen," is charged with looking after Tozai, and in the beginning he is cold and cruel. When Tozai wets himself on the seat of Gino's fancy car, he's quick to rub his nose in it. But soon the old man, who dreams of returning to Sicily, simply walks away, and Gino pursues him through Albania's desperate heartland. Here Amelio's film expands outward from a story of exploitation to include self-examination. It's a transformative journey for the increasingly disoriented Gino who is stripped of nearly everything, virtually becoming an Albanian. As he did in Amelio's previous film Stolen Children, Enrico Lo Verso gives a finely-shaded performance as Gino.
Amelio employs various modes of transportation including automobile, train, bus, truck, and ship that provide arenas for telling exchanges between Gino and Tozai and the Albanian people, but he also uses them to mark Gino's gradual devolution. At one point, his car is stripped of its tires while Tozai loses his shoes to a band of scavenging children. Gino's car kept him in a different orbit from the Albanian people. Once he loses it, he must "walk a mile in their shoes," though few Albanians seem to own a pair. Stolen, lost, envied, or given as gifts, shoes figure prominently and ironically in "Lamerica."
Lamerica should serve as a consciousness-raising experience for Americans for whom the debate over immigrants' rights continues to escalate, and nearly as an act of atonement for a filmmaker whose own country has a history of exploiting Albania. Whether Lamerica is hopeful or pessimistic depends on your perspective. It culminates in a catalogue of faces in close-up adrift somewhere between countries. As they look us in the eye, Amelio dares us to say who they are or what their dreams may be. They could be anyone. They could be our forefathers or descendants. They could be you or me. As Amelio uncovers the dismantling of both personal and national identity, his characters become both outcasts and citizens of the world - members, if you will, of the family of man.


A scene from Gianni Amelio's Lamerica. The film opens at the Varsity in October




The Hippie Revolution
at The Varsity Theatre
produced and directed by Jack O'Connell
September 23-25

Like that faction of hippies who espoused "turning on and dropping out," The Hippie Revolution has a druggy, facile quality. It lacks the historical perspective and taut narrative of a superior effort like Mark Kitchell's Berkeley in the '60s. Assembled from footage shot in and around San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district during 1967's Summer of Love, O'Connell has created a nearly exploitative kaleidoscope of images and music that overshadows the array of interviews, some of which seek to update their lives.
The film's primary focus is Today (formerly Louise) Malone, a 40-something, conservative-looking, devoted mother of two who we meet as a flower child in her early twenties while she recites a hilarious and revealing resume listing dope as one of her hobbies, selling dope as one of her job experiences, and "eventually marrying after traveling for a bit" as one of her aspirations. We see her panhandling, selling the "soaked in acid" Berkeley Barb, rapping in coffee shops, and taking what she claims to be LSD. O'Connell cuts to contemporary footage of Malone to capture her reactions which range from revulsion to sympathy to pride. At one point she throws up her hands in disgust as she watches herself naively listening to a drug dealer down-playing the dangers of cocaine.
We also meet, among others, a once-articulate street thespian advocating simple living and non-violence who is shown today to be a nearly incoherent proponent of capitalism and chaos; a clergyman who related well to youths with "soul," and who now works with the poor, exhorting former hippies to return to Haight-Ashbury with their money; nude members of the Sexual Freedom League, and workers both then and now in the district's Free Medical Clinic. But too often O'Connell falls back on rapid-fire montages that say more about media and advertising appropriation of psychoactive imagery than the essence of the movement itself. He's promised to show "what our hippie revolution was all about" and in doing so reveals that he is as enamored with the trappings of the movement as he is with penetrating the myths.




Emma
at the Guild 45th
written and directed by Douglas McGrath
adapted from the novel by Jane Austen

In the little town of Highbury, England, in the early 1800s, a small group of the insulated upper class, for whom painting, dancing, gossip and laughter are consuming absorptions, is gathered for dinner in a large, exquisitely appointed dining room. The suspiciously bright candlelight catches their best sides and gives the room a hypnotic radiance. Director McGrath is careful to have one of his actors rotate a knife slightly so that it glimmers in our direction - once, twice, perhaps three times. I turn to look at my companion. She's fast asleep.
Jane Austen's Emma is, on one side of the knife, a comedy of manners and manipulation. It's about a self-satisfied young woman who spends her time interfering in the love lives of others and therefore is in danger of missing out on love herself. On the other side of the knife, it's a razor sharp satire of class conceit revealing the lack of genuine kindness in the charity of the upper classes. The former provides abundant material for an entertainment that goes down easy, if one gives it the right shimmering spin. And McGrath delivers. His Emma is full of sparkling humor and as comfortable as a coma.
McGrath keeps it all light and amusing. Emma's efforts to convince the impressionable, lower class Harriet Smith (Toni Collette) to reject a decent farmer in favor of the unsavory clergyman, Mr. Elton (Alan Cumming), and, when that doesn't work out, to pursue the handsome but cavalier Frank Churchill (Ewan McGregor), are funny, indeed. Cumming seems to be invoking the spirit of Gene Wilder as Elton, and when Emma and Harriet visit the destitute who live virtually in the shadows of Elton's massive home (yes, the poor make an appearance in Emma, but not in a way that might ruin our good time), McGrath allows Collette to veer into buffoonery.
But the laughs should catch in our throats. Too often we do not feel the troubling underpinnings that make Emma's interference in the lives of others symptomatic of the cruelties of society at large. McGrath's Emma, as played by Gwyneth Paltrow, is nearly all serenity and delight when she should be scaring us a little with her capacity for unfeeling calculation. She and the film come to life only after Emma cruelly insults the sweet but incessantly prattling Miss Bates (Sophie Thompson) and is severely chided to tears for it by Mr. Knightly (Emma's closest male friend who acts as her conscience). Austen and McGrath make sure Emma realizes that Miss Bates makes an easy target because of her lower class, not because of her constant babbling. But the edge is soon dulled again. Emma gets her man but it comes less as a shattering surprise to her or us, more like the simple ulmination of a dance at an elegant ball.

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Contents on this page were published in the September/October, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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