| “It's hard to imagine what an original cinematic take on the 19th century Italian American immigrant experience might look like until the giant vegetables start showing up in Emanuele Crialese's beautiful, spacey, trans-oceanic odyssey Golden Door, winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato) is an illiterate, impoverished Sicilian widower considering emigrating to America with his elderly mother and two young sons. What America offers exactly, he doesn't know. He has no frame of reference for the place save for the handful of fanciful novelty postcards that have made their way back to his tiny, remote village — amazing pictures of miraculous produce the size of farm animals — and the equally incredible legends that circulate among his neighbors. What other wonders might this new world, where coins apparently sprout on trees, contain? When Salvatore tries to imagine his future, he sees himself wading into a river of milk, then climbing aboard a passing carrot the size of a canoe. This seems as good a guess as any.
The film's original Italian title is Nuovomondo, or "new world," a familiar, well-worn term that Crialese re-infuses with all the extraterrestrial wonder it must have once packed. He re-imagines the long and difficult voyage from a primitive, forgotten outpost of civilization to an immense, modern metropolis as a literal rebirth. Cooped up for days in the dark bowels of the ship, Salvatore, his family and the great majority of his fellow travelers have no way of guessing what's in store on Ellis Island or what awaits if they are allowed to pass through "the golden door" into America.....” |
