Golden Door (2007)

Very Cool!!!

Touches You

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

By Crialese is a fabulous look at the trauma encountered by a Sicilian immigrant family coming to the US in 1900. The film goes into more detail with stunning cinematography about the shipboard crossing and Ellis Island; it's like watching a documentary on Ellis Island. (like nothing even the History channel has done) the fixed instant marriages and the physical and psychological exams the immigrants endured. Crialese built an exact replica of the great hall for the film. One fabulous scene in which the Sicilian sheepherder Salvatore Mancuso takes the parts of a puzzle and instead of putting them into a puzzle builds a house with a barn is absolute beautiful. The film is in the Sicilian dialect with English subtitles. It's a must watch for anyone with immigrant roots. A must.

The Golden Door attempts to play out with authenticity and old world charm as we watch an early 20th century Italian family brave the rough waters to America. With decent production value and some fine cinematography we are led on a brief-but-extended, pseudo-epic journey which may please older emigrated families, but rarely will please film buffs craving some of the restrained vision this film pretends to have.For one it just seems the film's creator, Emanuele Crialese, is a bit young to be relaying this tale in such a detailed scope, and at times it really shows. Contrasting his often contrived and over-extended scenes with some inventive imagery might have been more successful had the surrealism been implemented a bit more maturely, but here the direction mostly comes across as silly or distracting.

"Nuovomondo" was a great experience. Many filmmakers tell their stories to a big extent via dialogue. Emanuele Crialese directs his film very visually driven. For everything he wants to tell, he finds powerful images that are able to stand for themselves. Thus, he understands film as a medium that primarily tells its stories over the pictures on screen. Particularly European cinema is often very dialogue-driven (and many of the young US-American directors are strongly influenced by that). Crialese's opposite attitude was really the point, that made this film special for me. It has also a very interesting topic that is wrapped up in a quite unusual story and told with humour. Vincenzo Amato is outstanding as family head Salvatore, as well as the amazing Charlotte Gainsbourg, who I enjoy watching in every single one of her movies. There are many great sequences in this movie. Just to pick one: When the ship leaves Italy and the people just quietly stare. This scene is great, particularly if you consider the pop cultural references that go with it (Titanic!).

Stranger things have happened than the director of 'Respiro' seeing the well-worn and much-loved opening credits sequence for Monty Python, and allowing his memory to resurface in the opening of this epic as two young men, now in close-up, now tiny and lost in the aerial microcosmic pattern of hill rocks, pieces of stone jammed in their bleeding mouths, struggle to the holy cairn at the top to ask a vital question. Simultaneously two girls, bearing promises of marriage to (perhaps) rich foreigners and photos of giant vegetables and American streets paved with gold, are persuaded to throw the photos away; the pictures are taken by a dumb lad to the cairn just as the eldest, Salvatore (Amato), begs the Gods to tell "us" if "we" should stay, or leave. Salvatore, his family, which gradually grows as the story opens out, are joined by a lost and rootless English lady (Gainsbourg) who decides to join the family if she can, to gain entry into the Promised Land. The story right from the start looks like a coat hanger for the visuals, and it is a treat throughout for the eyes. The great break as the ship leaves home is handled in a completely unconventional way: A God's-eye view shows the heads on board and the heads remaining on shore slowly separating as the ship moves out, as if the crowd is a 'people cake' that has been sliced. The sheer brutality of the situation these people have to live through is leavened by this kind of camera-work, and by the occasional magic dream, as when the no-longer brooding Salvatore's face is showered by coins. The tensions, though, coming out of the struggle to leave the Old Country, survive the voyage and pass into the New Country, and the simple efforts of strangers to cope with each other, keep it fascinating. Whenever Aurora Quattrocchi, 'Mama', is on screen, it seems to shift round to her point of view, yet another layer. The episodic structure, too, adds to the illusion of it's being shorter than it is. There are as many apparent links to the coming century as to the past here - the scenes on the mountain look like Pasolini, and the three males could almost have been the Marx BrothersAfter the nightmare of travelling 'steerage', a storm in mid-Atlantic and the interminable and humiliating selection process and 'aptitude' tests at Ellis Island (lack of intelligence has been scientifically proved to be genetically inherited, and we do not want these people amongst our citizens), it remains ambiguous whether everyone has got through to the Land of Milk and Honey, or the Mean Streets. I would say on the strength of this, that if anyone has the guts to put up the money for a film of 100 Years of Solitude, Crialese must be your man. CLIFF HANLEY