European Films

For his third feature Nuovomondo (Golden Door), Italian director Emanuele Crialese works with much the same configuration as his previous Respiro (Respiro: Grazia's Island), only substituting a delirious Valeria Golino for a reigned-in Charlotte Gainsbourgh. The film again starts with a shot of stones on an island (in this case Sicily rather than Lampedusa), and offers proof of both the growing clout -- and budget that comes with it -- of the director as much as his unwillingness to improve on the scattershot ideas and shaky character development that plagued his previous effort. 

Brooklyn-based Sicilian sculptor-actor Vincenzo Amato plays Salvatore, who again is the father to Francesco Casisa (who this times plays Angelo) and Filippo Pucillo, who incarnates the mute younger son Pietro. They live a barren existence in the mountains, putting their questions about life to a simple cross on a lonely mountaintop. Praying at the shrine, they unexpectedly lay an eye on a set of doctored postcards from the New World that show money growing on trees and onions the size of a grown man: they decide to leave at once. Changing their livestock for a pair of shoes each and semi-fancy clothes from the dead, they board a ship to America, together with the mysterious red-haired lady Lucy (called "Luce" or light by the Italians and played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), who for an unknown reason has ended up in Sicily and needs to board the ship with them.

 

The film's most indelible image is a simple shot of the ship parting from the the crowded harbour docks. Shot from an angle above the crowd on the ship, the mass of men and women in earthen coloured dress slowly separates itself into those who are leaving and those who remain behind. Cinematographer Agnès Godard (a frequent collaborator of Claire Denis) here acts like Moses separating the Red Sea. Nuovomondo's first section on the island tells us little about the characters other than that they are poor and probably not very well educated, which is highlighted by Lucy's presence, an well-learned lady in expensive clothes and who does not look like she just got her first pair of shoes an hour before departure.

 

On the ship however, Crialese, who also wrote the screenplay, continues to ignore the characters in favour of tableaux vivants that focus on the ordeal of crossing a vast expanse of water by ship: bad weather, no privacy, hair combing sessions for the girls, music making for the men and quickly established friendships that serve more as defence mechanisms than as proof of any human need for compassion or warmth. Crialese and Godard nicely establish the voyage as something claustrophobic despite the seize of the ship -- they never indulge in a shot showing the transatlantic ocean liner in full glory. Likewise, the arrival at the New World happens not with a triumphant view of the New York skyline but in a dense mist that shows nothing at all (those keeping an eye on the film's budget must have been grateful for these solutions as well).

 

On Ellis Island, where the immigrants were received and then tested as if they were pigs waiting to be selected for the possibility of being turned into precious Parma Ham, Crialese lingers on the system of eugenic decision-making on who to let in and who to refuse (a decision that in the eye of its makers would affect the future of the American race), which is indeed a strange curiosity with an ugly contemporary resonance. Puzzles need to be solved, questions answered, physical tasks and tests completed. In this third section, the characters are again objects used by the director to talk about his ever-shifting subject. When, late into the proceedings, two girls who travelled with Salvatore resurface again, it takes a while before it sinks in that they have been on screen before.

 

The film's approach to its three settings (mountainous Sicily, the crammed ship and Ellis Island) is such that it wants to document how people were treated in these locales, but Crialese does so to the detriment of his characters. The only character with some relief is Vincenzo, but the projection of his desire for a better life is not part of the scenes set in the physical world, but is instead conveyed in separate, magical-realist vignettes that show Salvatore's dreams of the New World as never-fulfilled epiphanies about money falling from trees, giant carrots and grapes and rivers of milk. They show that Vincenzo is a dreamer and one of the naive kind to boot. If he makes it through the Darwinian testing at Ellis Island (something which Crialese never makes clear), America will certainly be a big disappointment for him. A similar feeling could plague audiences of this film.

 

 

Buy the DVD at: internetbookshop.it. 

 

Browse for DVDs, soundtracks, books and more: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.de, dvdGO.es, nl.bol.com, allposters.com.