Cinema - Golden Door (Nuovo Mondo)

‘Nuovo Mondo’ is Italian for ‘New World’ and this is a movie about a Sicilian family who want, in 1904, to emigrate from their hard life on the Italian island to a potentially more comfortable existence across the Atlantic, wooed by propaganda postcards showing enormous vegetables, and coins growing on trees. The English title of the film ‘Golden Doors’ refers to the last hurdle they have to overcome before they are allowed into the United States: having landed on Ellis Island they are carefully assessed to see if they are worthy of becoming Americans, like so many horses at a fair.

In a way, both titles are misnomers, because Emanuele Crialese’s film is as much about leaving as it is about arriving. Crialese is an Italian Italian, rather than an American Italian (the director of the brilliant 2002 drama Respiro), and much of the film focuses on the family’s life in Italy before they leave, and the difficulties that arise from their decision to up their roots. It’s a slow-moving, poetically shot film, which won a Silver Lion award at the Venice film festival: one which has been met with mixed reviews. Some love its cinematography and flights into magical realism; others have found it long-winded and lacking in drama. One reviewer confessed to having fallen asleep in the middle, another calls it ‘imaginative, intelligent and attractive.’ Well-acted, too, particularly by male lead Vincenzo Armato; though the real star is the director of photography, Agnes Godard. DL