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| 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.