Kidnapped: A Masterpiece by Bellocchio

Barbara Ronchi and Enea Sala in Kidnapped.

The Italian Marco Bellocchio must surely be the world’s greatest living filmmaker, since his most plausible competition, the Swedish Jan Troell, who turns ninety-three this week, hasn’t released a movie in a dozen years. Bellocchio, who will be eighty-five in November, is still working at the peak of his powers six decades after he burst on the scene with his astonishing – and still shocking – first full-length picture, Fists in the Pocket. The Traitor, a remarkable portrait of a Mafia soldier who turns state’s witness against the man he believes has dishonored the institution, was the best picture of 2020. He followed it with Marx Can Wait, a wildly unconventional documentary about his family seen in the light of the suicide of one of his brothers. North Americans still haven’t had a chance to view Esterno Notte, his six-part TV series, which revisits the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, the subject of my own favorite Bellocchio movie, Good Morning, Night (2003). And this summer saw, all too briefly, his latest work, Kidnapped, which is a masterpiece.

Kidnapped isn’t based on the Robert Louis Stevenson adventure novel. It dramatizes one of the most notorious incidents in the history of European anti-Semitism and one of the nuttiest episodes in the long and bizarre history of Italy, known as the Mortara Affair. In Bologna in 1858, Pope Pius IX’s Inquisitor, Father Pier Feletti (Fabrizi Gifuni), arranges for the abduction of Edgardo Mortara, a little Jewish boy (Enea Sala, who has dark, expressive eyes), from his family on the grounds that in his infancy the child was secretly baptized by a maid in the Mortara home named Anna Morisi; he was feverish and she feared he would die and be locked out of the kingdom of heaven. Pius IX and Feletti argue that the baptism cancelled Edgardo’s Jewishness and made him a Christian for eternity and that therefore they have the indisputable right to seize him. This event occurs against the backdrop of the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy that began in 1861 and culminated in the capture of Rome ten years later, ending the power the Vatican had held without challenge since the Middle Ages. When the boy’s father, Momolo (Fausto Russo Alesi), tells his wife Marianna (Barbara Ronchi, who has the long-boned face of a woman in a Modigiliani painting) that the abduction has stirred up Judaic councils across Europe,she answers, “It’s nothing but words,” insisting that it would take Attila to defeat these enemies. She’s right:. The Roman Jewish Council has no leverage to get Edgardo returned to his parents; while Rome is still a Papal state they are obliged to abase themselves before Pius lest he invoke the racial laws the Vatican has instituted in the past. (Ironically, the Vatican owes the Rothschilds, the famous Jewish banking family, so much money, from loans the Holy See took out beginning half a century earlier, that if they called the debt it would bankrupt the Papacy.) So while the case draws international disapproval, including that of Napoleon III and the foreign press, and while Feletti is tried in court for kidnapping the child, sent to prison and then released, Edgardo Mortara grows up in the Church of Rome and gives his life to it. By the time the army of the Risorgimento, with one of Edgardo’s brothers in its ranks, takes over Rome, he is already a young priest in thrall to the Pope.

The half-mad Pius of Bellocchio’s film (played by Paolo Pirobon) believes that progress is leading the world to the edge of a precipice; he has nightmares in which Jews invade his bedroom to circumcise him. Cynthia Ozick underscores the weird juxtaposition of the modern and the Medieval in “The Story of My Family,” the marvelous short story she published in Commentary about the Mortara affair: “An Inquisitor in service to the Pope, and in burgeoning, fermenting modernity! Railways, telegraph, photography, international journalism, public gas lamps in every municipal thoroughfare!” The lost-in-time quality of Edgardo’s history is one of the elements that makes it as strange as a fairy tale, where the child hero loses his identity and finds himself reborn into a new world. The marshal (Bruno Cariello) who takes him promises that he can see his family as often as he likes, but it turns out they are seldom permitted to visit. His mother makes him promise to recite the Shema prayer (“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”) every night, but the two women who take charge of the boy take him into church and introduce him to the baptismal font, the icons, the New Testament paintings, then inform him that Christ was killed by the Jews and give him a cross; he is taught Latin prayers.  His new home is a boys’ dormitory in the House of the Catechumens, a Papal institution for converts, where he lives alongside other Jewish boys who have been adopted by the Vatican. One of them, Elia (Christian Mudu), warns him to be sly and advises him to study hard so that he can be sent home faster, but in truth only his family’s conversion to Catholicism could guarantee his return to them. But Edgardo is a perfect pupil, and with the open-mindedness of the very young he assimilates what he’s taught; it’s not just a performance. Another boy, Simone, has heart disease; his cohort is encouraged to pray for him, but he dies a few days after his baptism. Edgardo, struggling to make sense of his new religious instruction, complains to Elia that their prayers were useless, but the priest at his funeral glories in Simone’s fortune because he has gone straight to heaven. Only when Marianna is allowed to see him and, horrified at the crucifix around his neck, tears it off and throws it on the floor, does he break down, rushing after her and crying that he wants to go home to his siblings.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which the protagonist, Charles Ryder, is prevented from marrying the woman he loves, Julia Flyte, because he isn’t Catholic, there’s a passage where Julia talks wonderingly about the thread of faith inserted in her when she was very young that marked her for life. I kept thinking about that passage while I was watching Kidnapped, which is about the unpredictable complications of piling one set of religious beliefs onto another in a bright, imaginative child. Edgardo’s brother comes for him during the capture of the Vatican; it’s the long-delayed rescue that is supposed to happen when he’s a little boy but never does. (Friends of Momolo Montara attempt to stage a counter-kidnapping but it fails.) It arrives too late: Edgardo’s fealty to Pius IX and the Catholic church prompts him to reject his brother’s outstretched hand. But the superb screenplay, which Bellocchio wrote with Susanna Nicciarelli, Edoardo Albinati and Daniela Ceselli, adds an ambiguous scene during the protests when the Pope dies in 1878 and his body is buried in the Basilica. The protesters call for Pius’s body to be thrown in the Tiber; Edgardo is among the loyalists who exclaim, “Leave him alone!” – but then suddenly he turns, as if awakening from a dream, and allies himself with the anti-Pius faction. There’s an even more complex (and haunting) sequence where Edgardo, who hasn’t attended his father’s funeral, comes to his mother’s deathbed.

 Designed by Andrea Castorina and lit by Francesco Di Giacomo, Kidnapped presents mid-nineteenth-century Bologna with a dark, velvety richness, and the filmmaking has the dramatic drive and passion of a Puccini opera. It’s also impeccably performed, and Pirobon as Pius and Alesi and Ronchi as the Mortara parents are the standouts. The film is full of sequences that have Bellocchio’s signature on them, crowded canvases bursting with activity yet shot through with ideas and temperament, like the one where Momolo tries to toss Edgardo to Jewish friends in the street below to save him from the marshal (Momolo reneges because the boy is understandably terrified) and the botched rescue in church and Pius’s nightmare about the vengeful Jews descending on him. Bellocchio is such an unusual director. You can see the links to Visconti and Bellocchio’s fellow Italian New Wave prodigy Bertolucci; Edgardo’s turnaround during the protests at Pius’s burial recall the scene in The Conformist where Jean-Louis Trintignant’s Clerici abandons his Fascist identity on the streets of Rome after Mussolini’s fall, though the tone is, naturally, different. But Bellocchio’s theatricality is definitively his own, and he’s cerebral in a way that suggests no one as vividly as the young Godard. (The editing by Francesca Calvelli and Stefano Mariotti is vital for maintaining the clarity of the setpieces.) You walk out of the movie with not just your senses sharpened but your head full.

Since the millennium a play by Alfred Uhry and an opera by Francesco Cilluffo have dramatized the Mortara affair, but no one before Bellocchio has filmed it; Spielberg planned a movie eight years ago with Mark Rylance as Pius but it didn’t get off the ground. But in recent years there has been a film of a more infamous episode, the framing and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army, for treason at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Kidnapped, Roman Polanski’s 2019 An Officer and a Spy is a magnificent piece of work, though the bad odor around the director has kept it out of North American theatres and off streaming services. The recent wave of anti-Jewish sentiment around the globe has given these films a potent if unhappy relevancy. The narrator in Ozick’s story is a Jew, the grand-niece of Edgardo Mortara; she meets him only once, as an eight-year-old child, before she and her father escape Italy and relocate in New York. She’s baffled by her father’s obsession with his uncle’s story: “[W]hy was my father inflamed by a vanquished pope, an obsolete and silenced inquisitor?” “When you’re older you’ll understand,” her father assures her. “You think it distant, but nothing is distant, it’s as close as you are to me.” Edgardo Mortara died in a Belgian abbey in 1940; his story abuts the story of the Holocaust.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.