Gray: The Immigrant (2013)

Some five years in the making, this labour of love is based on James Gray’s own grandmother, who emigrated from Russia to the United States in the early 1920s. Marion Cottilard plays Ewa Cybulska, an immigrant who’s separated from her sister at Ellis Island and faced with deportation, only to be thrown upon the mercy of Bruno Weiss (Joaquim Phoenix), a Jewish pimp, and his cousin Emil (Jeremy Renner), an illusionist. For the most part, however, that’s more of a visual scheme than a narrative setup, since Gray reserves most of his energy for Cotillard’s face, adorning it with light, and preferring to shoot it reclining, or in repose, until it’s positively beatified by his camera. For great stretches, it’s so immobile that it’s more like watching a succession of still photographs, just as the film itself feels pressed out of photographic plate, sepia-tinted and mildewy around the edges, corroded by time as the cramped, tenement spaces where most of the action unfolds. In fact, Gray’s classical taste for the close-up is so out-of-date that it makes the film feel quite avant-garde, or at least arriere-garde, as if he’s discovering and sharing a long-obscured camera technique, and using it to discover something more immediate about his grandmother than his family stories might have afforded him. What he does discover is how drastically Ewa’s world contracts once she arrives in the land of the free, to the point where Ellis Island is the most expansive space in the entire film, extracting every immigrant’s dream of wide horizons on their way through. And the film contracts around Ewa in turn, like a spotlight steadily settling on her face, with the result that the action seems to affect her less and less even as it becomes more catastrophically and climactically centred on her perceptions of it. Perhaps that’s why none of the people she encounters ever exceed their convenience or contingency – with the exception of her sister, detained at Ellis Island – even or especially when they most demand some kind of facial recognition or reprieve. Like Roberto Rossellini with Ingmar Bergman, or Carl Theodor Dreyer with Renee Jean Falconetti, Gray elevates and abstracts Cotillard to a face set against the world, a face capable of weathering the whole world, a figurehead that never ceases to feel poised at the very prow of the immigrant experience, just as the film never frees itself from those first and most estranging footfalls on American soil.