A Martin Scorsese-produced ode to ignorance and superstition in his ancestral Sicily, Golden Door is a generic immigrant’s tale that too often mistakes blankness for mystery. It doesn’t start off badly, though, thanks to Claire Denis’ regular cinematographer Agnès Godard. In bracing sunshine, a couple of Italian bumpkins scramble up a mountain with rocks held fast in their mouths. At the top, they offer the blood-flecked objects to the image of a saint. It’s a silent act, fueled by equal parts optimism and suffering, and it’s beautifully filmed. Then the peasants pull out propaganda postcards that, for better or worse, represent their vision of America: huge, grotesque vegetables; gold coins dripping off trees. They’re trading folk art for kitsch, spiritual wealth for materialist profit.
The mixture of envy and pity that these postcards provoke comes on strong and does not let up. The characters show no sign of outgrowing their naiveté. They’re peasants, after all. How are they supposed to develop personalities when they don’t even have shoes? Occasional bursts of super-size whimsy (giant carrots floating down rivers of no doubt rapidly souring milk) and the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg (as an enigmatic Englishwoman migrating alongside the boatload of filthy Italians) do nothing to deepen the story.
The immigrants get on a boat, fight among themselves, die in a big storm, flirt innocently, disembark, get prodded in intimate areas, are tested for imbecility, muteness and the ability to manipulate wooden blocks, and so on. There are cute old people and cute young people and, yes, Charlotte Gainsbourg—but not a single character musters any sort of personal narrative. They crawl out of an Old World miasma and stride into an equally hazy America, superstitions and ignorance in hand. How uplifting. –Annie Wagner