Emanuele Crialese is an Italian director with a passion for Sicily, where he has family connections. His 2002 movie Respiro was set there, and had an arresting, if curious flavor. It was harsh and strange, like the island's famously rugged landscape, yet sentimental too. His excellent new film gives us the fierceness without the syrup: a solidly constructed film with a brilliant visual sense, tremendous performances and an eloquent, dreamy sense of time and place.
The Golden Door manages to be an historical movie, and a kind of allegory - but an allegory for what exactly? Everything about it appears pregnant with a meaning other than that which is being obviously denoted. Its simplicity is robust, and yet there is something under the surface, too. Even though little or nothing is happening at any time, it's a movie that exerts a casual grip - like the handshake of a quiet man with something unspecified to prove.
The setting is the turn of the 20th century (though Sicily is a place where nothing has changed for generations). Vincenzo Amato plays Salvatore Mancuso, a poor farmer whose head has been turned by exciting stories about how much money there is to be made in the new world of America. He has been galvanized by fake photographs showing giant vegetables growing in America's fabled soil and money literally growing on trees. So Mancuso gathers his entire extended family, including an elderly mother and two stubborn sons - one mute, the other merely laconic - and sells every animal they own for the ship's passage to New York.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CINEPLEX
The three men march grimly across the difficult, rocky terrain of Sicily, squabbling, scowling, cuffing the backs of each other's heads. The younger son, Pietro (Filippo Pucillo), wears a shapeless hat that gives him the air of a young and deadly serious Harpo Marx, and in fact the hapless brothers' fraternal rowing does look like a kind of Marx brothers comedy routine, without the comedy. Could this story of European integration into America be hinting at old-world influences on American culture - and show business itself?
The three men are poor, pugnacious, scared and defiant, yet have an attractive kind of openness and emotional impulsiveness, almost like children. When Salvatore and his two brothers present themselves for Crialese's camera in their best clothes - threadbare black suits and cloaks once owned by bandits - they look very much like the Corleone family lineup. Again, it's not clear if this allusion is deliberate, but the resemblance is compelling, and it's another clever glance at the genesis of the 20th-century US.
Crialese contrives a sensational image of the dense shipboard crowds bidding farewell to the quayside crush in a kind of stunned silence, the desolation of friends and family who will almost certainly never see each other again. Shot from above, the sea of heads parts as the ship pulls away, separated into those bound for the new world and those staying in the old. But here, too, is an irony: it is feral, primitive Sicily that looks more like the newfound North America of three centuries before.
The drama of the film unfolds on the ship itself. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a mysterious Englishwoman, Lucy, who has already been rejected from America once, been forced to endure the hellish passage back, and now tries the journey a third time. She is on the lookout for a husband or fiance, for without a respectable breadwinner she cannot hope to be admitted. Salvatore's open heart is melted by Lucy; the mystery of their almost wordless relationship, and of Lucy herself, underwrites the captivating enigma of the film. It held me in every frame.
FILM NOTES:
The Golden Door
DIRECTED BY: Emanuele Crialese
STARRING: Vincenzo Amao (Salvatore Mancuso), Pietro (Filippo Pucillo), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Lucy)
LANGUAGE: Italian and English
RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes
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