The Immigrant

Synopsis: In 1921 Ewa Cybulski (Marion Cotillard) and her sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan), arrive at Ellis Island USA on an immigrant boat from Poland. Magda is immediately quarantined due to possible tuberculosis, while Ewa is left with no support to fend for herself. She soon falls prey to the charming but ultimately deceitful vaudeville operator, Bruno Weisz (Joaquin Phoenix) who forces her into prostitution. Ewa keeps herself afloat by the thought that she can endure this ignominy as a means to save money to get her beloved sister out of quarantine. When Bruno’s cousin, Orlando (Jeremy Renner), a dashing magician, turns up, Ewa sees a possible escape from her degrading life, but Bruno will not easily let her go.

Director James Gray (We Own The Night, Two Lovers), also wrote the screenplay for this story inspired by tales he heard from his grandparents, Russian Jewish immigrants escaping pogroms in Europe. Instead of his protagonist being Jewish, however, he makes her a Catholic, perhaps to make more accessible the film’s issues of guilt and redemption. Bruno, however, is a Jewish character based upon a real-life pimp Gray heard of – an opportunistic man who preyed upon desperate young women who were denied entry to the United States and who were sitting ducks for his “help”.

Nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes and winning a Best Actress award for Cotillard, The Immigrant could be the supreme showcase to date for this astonishing actress, who won an Oscar for her performance in La Vie En Rose, and gave an inspirational performance in Rust And Bone. Just for starters she has to deliver many lines in Polish, a language which she learned solely for the part and appears to speak near flawlessly. Then we have her exquisite face, with eyes that speak without her lips uttering a single word. Cotillard’s character must do a lot of this, as Gray takes a fairly chaste approach and shows little of the sex or violence associated with the world’s oldest profession.

Phoenix is, as usual, an impressive and broody screen presence, and it is of credit to the writing and his portrayal that, although Bruno is essentially a manipulative and drunken bastard, we see other layers of his character worthy of a sliver of compassion. Renner’s Orlando is almost too dashing, in a very old fashioned vein, to be true. But then again old-fashioned is in some ways the word that comes most to mind when I think on this film: it has a substantial story with enough plot points to satisfy immensely and plenty of emotion wrenching.

Cinematographer Darius Knondji achieves an extraordinary colour palette that is at times like a translucent, gloriously modulated painting, and which dramatically evokes the era. Given the shooting was actually on Ellis Island, there is a palpable historical authenticity. A little known part of this history is that, despite the intimidating setting and belligerent immigration officers, there was solace for the immigrants with one wonderful scene having Enrico Caruso (Joseph Calleja) singing to lift people’s spirits. The seedy side of things is shown in the scenes involving Bruno’s review, with bare-breasted girls and drunken cat-calling men and when Bruno decides to pimp his girls under a bridge we feel the true despair of the plight in which these women find themselves.

The Immigrant is a beautifully crafted piece of story-telling, with two memorable performances at its centre, and serves as a reminder to us all of what so many went through, and are still going through today, to build their lives afresh.

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