The Golden Door film review

certificate_PG

THE GOLDEN DOOR

Emanuele Crialese's latest feature, a winner at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, returns to the impoverished Italy of his previous film Respiro. It's no surprise that Martin Scorsese has lent his name to boost the film's overseas take, as Scorsese himself has always been fascinated by the Italian immigrant population in the US: not only in his acclaimed gangster pictures but more directly in his 1973 documentary Italianamerican, in which he looks at his own family's roots in Sicily.

The Golden Door is a return to this year zero of Italian emigration, and follows the lives a of a small number of the first Italians to leave their country for the promised land. We first discover the Mancuso family ekeing out a meagre existence from the soil: they are illiterate, desperate and hungry people. When a local fixer arranges passage for them on a ship bound to Ellis Island, they scrabble together their few possessions and set off for a new life.

On board, the elder Salvatore meets and falls for an English emigre, who is curiously New York-bound in search of a husband. The two strike a deal of sorts, but the lengthy customs procedure at Ellis Island places an obstacle in their path.

The film succeeds in taking us back to a forgotten time and the simple uneducated peasants are convincingly played by an ensemble cast. Some may find the languid pace of the film jarring, while others may appreciate the way in which Crialese slowly develops the strange new world the travelers are facing.

Paul Hurley