Golden Door is ‘presented’ by Martin Scorsese, which basically means that, though it features European actors like Charlotte Gainsbourg, it has no stars who would appeal to an American audience, so this stamp of approval indicates that if you like films by Martin Scorsese... and it does have an element of Gangs of New York, with a sense of heightened reality and stylistic set pieces.

It is a very beautiful film full of images about immigration to the States. Cinematographer Agnés Godard wields the camera as though she were an artist and creates a series of stunning panoramas. It begins with a silent sequence as two tiny dots against the mountains climb barefoot and bleeding with stones in their mouths to place on a cairn and ask for a sign whether they should stay or go. There is no sound except the wind, the birds and the insects, and this eerie silence is maintained in a film of very little dialogue – indeed one of the characters is deaf and mute.

The format of the film is a clear triptych, following a Sicilian family and Miss Lucy (Gainsbourg), an English intruder, from the island, onto an ocean liner and finally to be delivered to the customs facility at Ellis Island USA. It presents another slant on the immigrant’s tale, but this version is more about the transition than the destination. The weight of the detail becomes almost crushing as the camera sweeps overhead revealing waiting passengers huddled on the wharf, or the parting of the ship in silence from the quay; a visible rent appearing between the old and the new world.

Conditions on board are rendered in vivid episodes; fighting for tiny bunks; the women brushing each other’s hair; the men singing lusty songs; stillborn babies thrown overboard; a storm which causes chaos and death; bodies tumbling about below decks; and groans and howls from deep within the ship itself. The love interest seems superimposed – if you have a ship, you must have a love story; it worked for Titanic – and when Lucy and Mancuno Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato) meet on board, they are swallowed in mist as though no one else is present, a meeting as mysterious and enigmatic as the presence of the aristocratic Lucy, which is never explained.

Indeed, there is a lot that director, Emanuele Crialese, fails to explain. At the arrival of the passengers into America, there are no shots of skyscrapers or even the Statue of Liberty herself, but lines of backs silhouetted against the light from the sky; becoming interchangeable and unimportant. At customs they are lined up and subjected to invasive examinations, humiliating tests and communal showers. Large luggage labels around their necks make them seem like evacuees, meals are served under prison-like conditions, and families are divided.

To the ironic music of “Feelin’ Good”, immigrants are set a series of mental agility tests “to prohibit people of below average intelligence from mixing with our citizens”. The opportunities for sarcasm are too obvious to mention, but Lucy does. Answering the question how many legs on a pig, a cow and a hen, one character holds up ten fingers in a gesture of surrender. Failure or refusal to take the test results in deportation. Women can’t get into America without a husband, and there is a scene of men and women lined up opposite each other like some ghastly formal dance, picking future spouses from people they have never met before.

Crialese seems to have many points he wants to make, but he crams the film with metaphor and stunning images at the expense of its characters. Back in Sicily, the departing family were told, “Those who leave are seeds to be planted in more fertile soil. You’re our future,” but we never know why these people risked everything to travel to the new world; the original title of the film is “Nuovomondo”, unless it was merely for greed, in which case it is hard to engage with them.

Salvatore saw pictures of colossal vegetables and money growing on trees which lured him here, and there are surreal shots of characters swimming in rivers of milk, clinging to giant floating carrots. Aurora Qattrocchi is wonderful as the haughty and indomitable matriarch, but she is the only character allowed any sense of development. When looking through a window at the “houses in the sky” one man asks how they reach them and is told that a wooden box carries people up and down on its own; coffin image, anyone? For these people who live their lives in connection with the earth, this is death to their souls.

There is so much symbolism that this film is stylised to within an inch of its life, but greatly lacking in substance. Watch it on the big screen and let the gorgeous compositions wash over you. It’s interesting and it’s beautiful, but two-dimensional and impossible to empathise.—Kate Blackhurst