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Golden Door

4 stars out of 5.0
Golden Door

Released as 'Nuovomundo' in its native Italy - 'The New World' is taken, right? - Golden Door is the second film to reach these shores by Emanuele Crialese, the writer-director of Respiro.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century, it's a film about a family of illiterate Sicilian peasants coming to America, spurred on by doctored photographs of money growing on trees and chickens the size of donkeys.

They find passage on a great steam ship. Men and women are immediately separated, and such is the overcrowding the emigrants are literally sleeping on top of each other. Chief among the characters is Vincenzo Amato (Francesco Casisa) and his two sons, one of whom is a deaf-mute. Along with grandmother and two more villagers, they set off with minimal resources and vast expectations.

There isn't a great deal of plot, per se. Not only illiterate, they're taciturn too. But Amato catches the eye of a mysteriously stranded bourgeois woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and vice versa. She has a surprising proposal for him.

Golden Door

Arriving in Ellis Island the Sicilians find that getting into America is not such plain sailing as they had been led to believe. This is the film's third Act in effect, and the best. Anyone who's had tried to pass into Fortress America recently will certainly sympathise as Amato and his kin are subjected to a battery of physical and psychological tests.

That's all there is to it. Yet despite the familiarity of the journey, the unsentimental dignity the filmmaker accords his superstitious travelers commands our respect, and Crialese's handsome widescreen compositions and poetic imagination keep you rapt. The film was shot by Agnes Godard, whose work with the French director Claire Denis has made her one of the best cinematographers in the world. There's ample evidence to back up that assessment here.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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