Clowns, Guns and a Writer’s Block:

Romanian-American Encounters in Her Alibi (1989)

Abstract

When Bruce Beresford’s film Her Alibi was released in early 1989, it was unenthusiastically received by the American critics and audiences as just another mixture of romantic comedy, crime and mystery, better suited perhaps to television than to the big screen. What seems to be paid little attention to in numerous professional or amateur reviews of the film is that it actually foregrounds the encounter of the American culture with the Romanian other. Not only does it reflect cultural differences that shape the sense of identity of the American hosts and of the Romanian migrants, but it sets them against the
background of the tensions between the West, represented by the USA, and the East, represented by communist Romania, over the last years of the Cold War. The paper proposes an imagological exploration of the interplay of images of American identity in the late 1980s and of the Romanian migrant, trapped between ‘Home’ and the ‘West’, in an American production that, more or less explicitly, draws on propaganda-ridden Cold War themes.