Someone Else's America.

A modest but winning little movie is Someone Else's America, by the Yugoslav director Goran Paskaljevic/, from a screenplay by Gordan Mihic/. It concerns, mainly, the lives of two Brooklyn friends: Alonso, a timorous Spanish immigrant who owns a shabby bar, where he lets Bayo, a fierce illegal immigrant from Montenegro, live and clean up between a variety of other, underpaid and often dangerous, jobs. Alonso harbors a hopeless love for a Syrian girl in the melting-pot where they all live, and Bayo, for trying to help him, gets into all sorts of trouble.

Back in Montenegro, Anja, Bayo's mother, finds it impossible to survive with three grandchildren: Luka, a successful hustler who, nevertheless, is no match for a crooked postal clerk who steals Bayo's letters and the money they contain; Pepo, the sweet little accordion-playing younger brother; and Savka, the sister who, not hearing from her dad, will not eat or sleep. They manage to get themselves smuggled into the U.S.A., but, as they wade across the Rio Grande, Pepo's accordion is snatched away by the current; the boy swims after it and disappears.

The heartbroken others make it to Brooklyn, but Bayo, fanatically believing in the boy's survival, and helped in part by Alonso, conducts an obstinately self-deluding, endless search for Pepo. Back in Brooklyn, he irrationally blames Luka for everything. Meanwhile Anja can't get used to America, even as Alonso's blind, now deceased mother (played by the great Maria Casarcs, absent from the screen too long) couldn't until, with the help of a stone table, a fake well, and a genuine goat, Alonso and Bayo fooled her into believing herself back in Spain. Though sighted, Anja resigns herself, through the same table, well, and goat, into staying, and, with her cooking, turns Alonso's bar into a bustling eatery. Luka marries a Chinese-American girl from across the street, and is a better hustler than ever with his newly acquired green card, but finds it hard to cope with his father's wrath; Bayo even believes him to be another man's child.

For all these dramatic elements, the film is a racy, folksy comedy, handsomely shot in Greece, Mexico, and New York, especially a Brooklyn teeming with ethnic variety and zesty humor; Yorgos Arvanitis's camera helps create a place as exotic for the viewer as for its struggling inhabitants. Tom Conti plays Alonso with boundless gusto, investing even his crestfallen moments with comic verve; the Yugoslav actor Miki Manojlovic/ (a star also of the Cannes-prize-winning Underground, yet to be released here) gives a performance so explosive it practically leaps into your lap. No less fine is the Luka of Sergej Trifunovic; in fact, only Manojlovic's real-life mother is unimpressive, as Anja.

Some of the dialogue is in Serbo-Croatian and somewhat skimpily subtitled, but Paskaljevic's direction and Mihic's screenplay, though a bit repetitious at times, have a zesty feel for people of various backgrounds, and are good in both serious and comic moments, better yet when bittersweetly seriocomic. Only Andrew Dickson's self-consciously folk-tinted score is bothersome; the film itself is tangy and idiomatic. It is not unlike Bayo's beloved bantam rooster, small but plucky.