A Piece of a Personal Heaven

Do you remember the place where you've been happiest? Family's home at the age of five, grandma's place out in the village, with the vast fields or maybe next to some fantastic beach, the accent that your loved one has that is a bit foreign to you? My place was the grandma's home, a house in a small town, few miles from the seashore, where people spoke with a strange accent, stretching the words, giving the language some easiness, as if everything was slow, gentle and beautiful over there.

The war came to the region and it became out of limits for a boy that did not want to take a gun. I moved around and had no opportunity to return. It was when I came to Canada that I was reminded of the joy of the grandma's place.

Goran Paskaljevic's movie Someone Else's America has a charm and quality rarely seen in today's movies, being closest to the charm of Italian films like Cinema Paradiso and feeling of the long lost heaven of individual's life. Alonso (Tom Conti) and Bayo (Miki Manojlovic) are two grumpy middle aged men living above a shabby restaurant in Brooklyn. These two great actors are a prefect touch for Paskaljevic's fairy tale about pursuing American Dream. Paskaljevic's New York is a multi-ethnic place with its tensions but fuelled with some divine optimism and a shared sense of struggle, putting America back in its place of the land of infinite opportunity and New York an Emerald City. Alonso owns a shabby neighbourhood bar where Bayo, his friend, an illegal immigrant from Yugoslavia lives for free in exchange for maintenance work. Both, being from Spanish and Montenegrin villages where value of friendship and pride count more than life, they are loyal to each other and pull out a lot for a friend. The main story of the film is about the journey of Bayo's family from their Montenegrin village to USA, entering the country illegally. Bayo's mother Anja (Zorka Manojlovic, Manojlovic's real life mother) and his three children come to visit him since they have not heard from him for a long time, his letters never reached Anja. As the family crosses Rio Grande, an accordion belonging to Bayo's youngest son Pepo slips and the boy, his father's dearest ("chedo," Serbian word describing the same) boy tries to retrieve it and is taken by the current.

Bayo travels to Texas in order to perform a search for his chedo that turns completely fruitless. Bayo irrationally blames Luka (Sergej Trifunovic), his eldest son for the loss. Luka being the hustler that he is, he is determined to make it in America. He makes Alonso's bar into a successful place, marries a Chinese-American woman, thus obtaining citizenship. The only part of the movie that lacks quality is Trifunovic's acting. Trifunovic, being a drug user is placed next to Lawrence Olivier of the Balkans, Miki Manojlovic, making Trifunovic rather small and worthless.

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