Review: Kidnapped
- CANNES 2023: Marco Bellocchio takes the kidnap of a Jewish child and the abuse of power on the part of a “Pope King” as a pretext for a new reinterpretation of the present in light of the past
The “Edgardo Mortara affair” was a ten-year project which was started and then abandoned by Steven Spielberg. However, this story of the abduction of a Jewish child who was torn away from his birth family in Bologna in 1858 and raised as a Catholic under the custody of Pope Pius IX, has now been adapted for the big screen by Marco Bellocchio, who’s competing in the Cannes Film Festival with his movie Kidnapped [+see also:
trailer
film profile], loosely based on a book by Daniele Scalise and penned by the director in league with Susanna Nicchiarelli.
Interweaving the public and private spheres, Bellocchio explores this irreparable injustice, this abuse of power on the part of the last “Pope King” who fought against secular society and found himself faced with the historic moment the modern nation state was born in Italy. On the pretext of an alleged secret baptism by a young Catholic maid, the Inquisitor of the Holy Office Pier Gaetano Feletti (Fabrizio Gifuni) ordered the police to remove little Edgardo (Enea Sala and, as an adult, Leonardo Maltese) from his home by force and bring him to Rome’s Catecumeni School where he would be educated according to the rules of the Roman Church. His desperate parents (Barbara Ronchi and Fausto Russo Alesi) would have to wait four months before they could see him, while the affair travelled beyond Italian borders to become an international affair. Even Napoleon III made it known that he “didn’t like” the kidnapping carried out by Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon).
Edgardo’s body is a contested body, much like Aldo Moro’s in Good Morning, Night [+see also:
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interview: Marco Bellocchio, director …
film profile] and Exterior Night [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Marco Bellocchio
series profile] (which also feature a “political” kidnapping) or in Dormant Beauty [+see also:
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interview: Marco Bellocchio
film profile], and several of the archetypes employed by Bellocchio – one of the most lucid and coherent voices in European cinema – are updated here in a re-interpretation of the present via a revisitation of the past. Ever since he took his first bow in filmmaking, the director has seen, through a secular eye, the Catholic Church as an institution which supports the authority of neo-capitalism and enslaves us to hypocrisy and prejudice. In Kidnapped, the Church and the political authorities overlap, reminiscent of the religious fanaticism at large in various countries today and the onerous burden of violence and oppression this entails. But, as ever, Bellocchio is most interested in the dynamics of the family as a social body which can be attacked and taken by storm by the authorities. The father figure is a recurrent feature in the director’s filmography, for declared autobiographical reasons, and, in this instance, the Pope is a father who takes the place of a biological father.
The film’s composition relies on sophisticated use of cross-cutting (by the ever-faithful Francesca Calvelli), which juxtaposes the family’s anguish with the tenacious resolve of the Pope, and the rituals of the Ecclesiastic regime, seated on their magnificent thrones of power, with the religious rituals of an enemy who uses the same words to speak about God but belongs to a downtrodden, controlled and ghettoised people, in the very literal sense of the word. Francesco Di Giacomo’s trademark chiaroscuro photography, which explores the characters’ faces at close range, and Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s peremptory musical accentuations highlight the dramatic nature of the story, while the director’s steady film language avails itself of the grotesque – the Pope creeping up the “holy stairs” or being knocked over by enthusiastic, young Edgardo, who’s now a zealous Christian - and of dreamlike segments not really taking place within the story. In one key scene, little Edgardo frees the suffering man whom he knows has been “killed by the Jews” from the nails pinning him to the cross. Jesus climbs down and silently walks away from the church, as if distancing himself from the Pope and the Church. Much like Aldo Moro, moreover, who, in a utopian fantasy, leaves his room-come-prison and avoids execution at the hands of the terrorists who abducted him.
Kidnapped is produced by IBC Movie and Kavac Film together with RAI Cinema, in co-production with Ad Vitam Production and Arte France Cinéma (France) and The Match Factory (Germany). International sales are entrusted to The Match Factory.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 23/05/2023: Cannes 2023 - Kidnapped
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© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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