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Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, Aurora Quattrocchi, Francesco Casisa, Filippo Pucillo
Director: Emanuele Crialese
Running time: 118 mins Rating: PG, low-level offensive language
Screening: Academy
Verdict: An emigrant's-eye view of going to America is a film of some mastery, channelling Fellini and speaking to the present day.
Sicilian writer-director Crialese adds another to the list of great immigrant films with this evocative, poetic drama about a family of his compatriots who make the fateful Atlantic crossing in 1904. The title quotes the inscription on the Statue of Liberty; the Italian one - New World - alludes to the longed-for destination. Yet we see neither. This is a film about passage, not arrival and its sole flaw is that Crialese loses his nerve with an ending both glib and abrupt.
From the first scene, Crialese, working with the great cinematographer Agnes Godard, seems to be channelling Fellini, even Pasolini: Salvatore Mancuso (Amato) and his son Angelo (Casisa) scale a local mountain, barefoot. The stones clamped between their bleeding lips are for dropping at the foot of a wooden cross on the summit, in the hope of a sign as to whether they should emigrate.
The answer comes from an unlikely quarter: Salvatore's younger, deaf-mute son (Pucillo) has novelty postcards that depict America as a land where chooks are the size of mules and money grows on trees. It's an idea that will be picked up later in playful and sparingly-used fantasy sequences that perfectly capture the emigrant's blend of superstition, hope and misapprehension.
The film divides the passage of this trio - with Salvatore's mother (Quattrocchi) and two young women entrusted to their care - into three distinct parts: to the port, across the sea, and through the tortuous immigration processing in New York. Each has its own drama and the film stages them as a series of magnificent cinematic set pieces: the ship pulling silently away from the dock, the mayhem below decks during rough weather, the women brushing each other's hair. Meanwhile, we are reminded of how isolated Sicilians of that time were: they had no idea they were Italian and their music is far more redolent of Arabia than Europe.
The presence of Gainsbourg as an English-speaking bourgeois woman among the passengers is annoyingly mysterious and ultimately forgotten and it's hard to see what she adds to the otherwise knuckle-whitening Ellis Island sequences. She has no line as powerful as that given to Salvatore's mother, the ironically named Fortunata: "You think you are God," she spits at the officials, "to decide if we are fit to enter your world." A modern resonance is not difficult to discern.
