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MovieMail's Review
Opening with two barefooted figures scrambling across rocky terrain towards an inaccessible Sicilian shrine, Emanuelle Crialese's Golden Door is a poignant study of the perils, sacrifices and indignities endured by the huddled masses that emigrated to the United States in the early part of the last century. Offering a fresh perspective on the themes of belonging and identity that Crialese explored in Respiro (2002), this also raises timely questions about contemporary American attitudes to the cosmopolitanism that expedited its global pre-eminence.
Convinced that some confiscated photographs of giant vegetables and trees bearing coins are a sign that his destiny lies across the Atlantic, widower Vincenzo Amato sells his livestock to buy suits and shoes for himself and his sons, one of whom is mute. With his reluctant mother (Aurora Quattrocchi) and a pair of young mail-order brides in tow, he reaches the coast, where he agrees to escort an enigmatic Englishwoman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) on the voyage. With rumours of her exotic background merging in his imagination with visions of a fabled river of milk, Amato agrees to marry Gainsbourg en route to the New World. But first they have to get through the ‘golden door’ of Ellis Island.
Crialese first conceived this magic realist drama in 1999 and it’s clearly a personal project. The section in third-class steerage occasionally presents a rather romanticised view of what was often a perilous journey. But Crialese brings a greater rigour to the recreation of the physical and psychological scrutiny to which the would-be immigrants were subjected by the unwelcoming battalion of officials, cops and medics. In particular, the moment in the matchmaking hall when naive peasants Federica de Cola and Isabella Ragonese realise they've been duped by ugly, older men is touchingly tainted with bitter reality.
A little injudicious fantasy is allowed to intrude upon a denouement whose lingering sentimentality renders the closing images unpersuasively reassuring. But the compelling blend of melodrama and period authenticity is complemented by Agnès Godard's glorious cinematography that frequently evokes the work of Mario Masini on the Tavianis' Padre Padrone (1977) and Giuseppe Rotunno on Fellini's And the Ship Sails On (1984).
Opening with two bare-footed figures scrambling across rocky terrain towards an inaccessible Sicilian shrine, Emanuelle Crialese's Golden Door is a poignant study of the perils, sacrifices and indignities endured by the huddled masses that emigrated to the United States in the early part of the last century.
Enhanced by the expressive cinematography of Agnes Godard, Emanuele Crialese’s Golden Door is a visually striking tone poem that follows the journey of a peasant famil... more >
Enhanced by the expressive cinematography of Agnes Godard, Emanuele Crialese’s Golden Door is a visually striking tone poem that follows the journey of a peasant family from their primitive home in Sicily to Ellis Island in New York at the turn of the century. It is a surreal, enigmatic, often strange, but ultimately deeply rewarding experience that interweaves dreamlike and symbolic imagery with gritty realism. Like an impressionistic painting, Golden Door is a cinematic artist’s rendering of what the immigration process may have been like for our parents and grandparents.
Guided by letters he read of immigrants sent to relatives who remained at home, Crialese identifies with those impoverished immigrants who are able to see the positive side of things beyond their ordeal. To Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) and his older son Angelo (Francesco Casisa), America is a distant dream that they know nothing about but, spurred by tantalizing post cards depicting a land of untold riches, one they are eager to explore.
The voyage is treacherous with a violent storm buffeting the ship and the rite of passage through immigration processing at Ellis Island does not become any easier. Crialese attacks the way illiterate peasants, in the name of preserving “civilized” society, are forced to put puzzles together, perform mathematical tasks, and undergo humiliating medical examinations to prove they are “fit”.
Through the fog the immigrant’s can barely see the land of milk and honey and there is no Statue of Liberty asking for the tired and the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. In their imagination, however, the river is still flowing, waiting for them to jump in. Though the ending is ambiguous and one door opens on to a blank wall, another door symbolizes a rebirth of the soul and the passage we must all take from the old world to the new. < less
