Vincenzo Amato leads the cast in this story about leaving your homeland and dreaming of a golden future. Opening in Sicily, onto a landscape made up of nothing but stones it’s not much of a surprise that the farmers there are barely able to scrape a living. It’s an arid, barren, uncomfortable place, and the locals are firm believers in superstition; the biblical reference to seeds falling on stony ground is picked up later with the idea of being transplanted into more fertile soil in the United States.
Widower Salvatore Mancuso (Amato) and his little group are lured to America by doctored photographs of gigantic chickens and enormous vegetables. Crialese uses surreal sequences such as Mancuso swimming in a river of milk while a carrot bigger than himself floats by as relief from the scenes of difficulties and discomfort. Mancuso leaves with his aged mother, a healer and symbol of the Old World, his sons and two young women who have been ‘sold’ to wealthy Americans. These girls throw up a reminder of The Piano, young women going out to the colonies to marry strangers, and the cinematography is similarly atmospheric.
Filmed in three stages, there is the long walk from their Sicilian home wearing the clothes of dead villagers so they will look like kings when they arrive in the New World, the sea voyage, and the process of immigration at Ellis Island. On the journey Mancuso experiences hallucinations about the land of plenty, such as money falling from the stars, which keep him focussed on his bright future. On the boat, travelling third class, the Italians are loaded aboard like cattle and the camera is kept close-up forcing the chaos and overcrowding right in our faces and reinforcing the sense of claustrophobia and physical intimacy.
At Ellis Island the travellers are submitted to a clinical, scientific selection process; the land of progress assesses immigrants for ‘feeble-mindedness’ and medical shortcomings. The logic of only allowing the intelligent into America should therefore mean that all the following generations of Americans must be the brightest and most healthy on the planet. The coldness of this process is saved from being utterly repellent by using Mancuso’s viewpoint; he obediently follows every instruction and urges his group to do the same because he can see the reasoning behind it. All this, and they haven’t even had a glimpse of land.
One of the most difficult scenes to endure is the virtual horse-trading of the young women who have spent hours grooming and beautifying themselves before they step off the boat and arrive clothed in magnificent national dress, ribbons trailing and wearing head-dresses which appears to lift them from peasants to duchesses. They sit patiently in rows waiting to be ‘called out’ by American men looking for brides. It is excruciating to watch but, we are rewarded by a hint of romance as gentlemanly, calm and affectionate Mancuso ‘calls out’ Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a young Englishwomen he has met on the journey. She wants a marriage of convenience but Crialese has the goodness to leave us with hope for a promising future, a possible marriage of native wit (Mancuso) and sophistication (Gainsbourg) or, the old world and the new.
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