There is an almost-magical moment in Emanuele Crialese’s
Golden Door, whose Italian title is Nuovomondo or
“New World.” On a ship full of mainly Italian immigrants to the
United States some time during the first decade of the last
century, a mysterious English lady named Lucy (Charlotte
Gainsbourg) asks an illiterate Sicilian peasant named Salvatore
(Vincenzo Amato) if he would marry her. We know nothing of her
origins except that they must be (at least) middle class. She is
educated and comparatively well-dressed, and she speaks Italian
fluently. Yet she has no passport and travels alone and in
steerage, along with the poor people. For reasons that are not
quite clear, she thinks that attaching herself to Salvatore and his
family (his mother, two brothers and two sisters) will help her to
be accepted as an immigrant when the ship docks at Ellis Island. We
have also been shown that she has another offer: to enter the
country as the mistress of one of the rich men in first class.
Instead, she chooses Salvatore, who has been smitten since the
first moment he saw her. He naturally agrees at once to marry
her.
“I’m not marrying you for love,” Lucy warns him.
Salvatore looks puzzled. “Love? We hardly know each other. These
things take time, right?”
Somewhat hesitantly, Lucy replies, “Yes.” Salvatore then asks
her for a lock of her hair. Once he has subjected it to certain
spells or other treatments he has learned from his mother, known as
a wise woman back home in Petralia Sottana, he will make her love
him.
“I don’t believe in magic,” Lucy insists.
“With time, I will teach you,” he replies confidently.
Obviously, Mr. Crialese thinks he can teach us too. His movie is
shot through with the techniques of magic realism, though for the
most part he keeps it closer to realism than to magic. I wish he
had kept it closer still, for to my eye he doesn’t quite bring the
magic off. Wisely, I think, he makes the magical element grow
naturally out of the peasant superstitions that are everywhere in
the Sicilian campagna where we spend the first third of
the film. It begins with two men in bare feet climbing a
rock-strewn mountain slope with stones in their mouths. They
approach a cross erected on the mountain-top and deposit the stones
alongside others, asking as they do for a sign that they should or
should not emigrate. They then sit back to wait with complete
confidence that a sign will be given.
I was immediately hooked. This is a film about the dream of a
new world, but from our point of view it is the persuasive
depiction of the old world that is strange, new and exciting. But I
also have to say that there are some drawbacks. One is that the
characters, though vividly realized, seem to inhabit only the world
of the film and to answer to nothing in ours — which, I take it,
the best movies of its kind would do. Part of the problem is that
Lucy is given no backstory and hence no motivation for what seems
some distinctly odd behavior. We are driven back upon the
conclusion that she herself is a kind of magical apparition,
perhaps the sign that Salvatore has asked for, since we have to
accept that she is just the kind of thing that happens in the
film’s world — not, that is, in the one we know.
This problem is only exacerbated by the magnetic presence of
Miss Gainsbourg on the screen. That impossibly prognathous jaw set
atop that improbably slender form makes her a true jolie
laide and makes me, at any rate, unable to take my eyes off
her. Moreover, Aurora Quattrocchi in the role of Salvatore’s
mother, Fortunata, is almost her equal for charisma if not for
sexiness. The two women between them represent the two poles of
Salvatore’s existence: the past and the future, Sicily and America,
the old and new worlds, yet so compelling are they in themselves
that we are constantly tempted to forget any life beyond them.
This seems to be the effect Mr. Crialese was trying for. We see
nothing of America in the film except for the processing facilities
at Ellis Island. The country remains as much our fantasy as it is
the immigrants’, and the film takes advantage of the fact by
introducing several fantastical interludes. In particular, one of
the immigrants says that he has heard that there are in America
rivers of milk. They have also seen joke postcards featuring giant
vegetables. So we are treated to images of the characters bobbing
about in not a river but a lake of milk, or of carrots that are as
big as themselves. At this point, the peasant magic has gone where
I can no longer follow.
But when Salvatore has himself boosted up beyond the frosted
glass where he can catch a glimpse of the New York skyline and says
he wouldn’t mind living in the sky; or when he has his first taste
of white bread and thoughtfully observes that it is like eating a
cloud — these are moments to treasure along with the prospective
magic of the union of Lucy and Salvatore. At these moments, you
will believe.
