Film Review | Papal Sins in Period Piece Form

It was almost 60 years ago that Marco Bellocchio stepped boldly into the pantheon of important auteurs with his stark yet potent debut film Fist in His Pocket, an almost pre-punk tale of adolescent angst gone very dark. It has been deemed one of the great Italian films of the ‘60s, and the director has since steadily built up a solid and often intriguingly stylized filmography with highlights including the devil-ish exploration of sexuality, Devil in the Flesh, his Silver Bear winning The Conviction, and The Eyes, the Mouth, loosely about the suicide of the director’s twin brother.

Bellocchio, who has been labeled a Marxist and was a friend of gay/Marxist/Catholic director Piero Pasolini, has not been squeamish about trafficking themes regarding religion, politics and the tangled mazes of inner lives and relationships.

Now 82, Bellocchio has returned to cinematic spotlight with his latest film, Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, in which he takes aim at the harshness and hypocrisy of the Catholic church (also a theme in his 2002 film My Mother’s Smile), and, strangely, one of the straighter and ultimately more melodramatic items in his oeuvre. In this case, reality and history provide the necessary points of tension and outrage for a script which relishes the opportunity to delve into period piece mode — with impressive production values in tow — and expose a too little-known transitional moment in the history of Papal power in Italian society. (Spoiler alert: the iniquities of the Catholic church do not involve sexual abuse, this time.)

Loosely basing his co-written script on Daniele Scalise, Bellocchio effectively plunges us into another era in Italian religion and politics, during the mid-19^th century reign of Pope Pius IX (chillingly played by Paolo Pierobon), and the practice of “kidnapping” children from the Jewish quarters of Bologna after being baptized — aka “saved from limbo.” The pivotal, true-life story of seven-year-old Edgardo Mortara (Enea Sala and Leonardo Maltese), who was stealthily baptized by a housekeeper and thus subject to the Catholic Holy Inquisition office’s barbaric practice of stealing the children for re-education as Catholics, starting in 1856.

Edgardo’s plot thickens in sync with the struggle of his frustrated parents (Barbara Ronchi, as his mother, is especially captivating) to liberate the child, which later involves outraged protests and press campaigns in Bologna. Attempts to bring the wheels of legal justice into the equation gives rise to a passage in the film which suddenly goes “courtroom drama” place, with trial scenes and rituals juxtaposed with the rituals of a Catholic confirmation ceremony. Dream scenes lift us out of historical reality on occasion, as when Edgardo prays to a Jesus effigy, who comes down from his crucifix (set to the by-now cliched sound of Arvo Part’s music).

At times, Bellocchio seems swept up in the inherent indignation built into the story, to the point of turning the film into a monochromatic morality tale and saga in the long, dark legacy of anti-Semitism and Papal self-righteousness — a poke at the Pope of a certain era. But part of the film’s dramatic engineering on a more intimate, personal level, within the corrupt institutional overview, relates to Edgardo’s indoctrination, at first forced but later leading.

Two of the more poignant and painful scenes in the film find mother and son exchanging fragile words and encoded glances, at different points in Edgardo’s reformed, re-educated life. In these moments, the sometimes generic film fleetingly taps depths of human/family/spiritual connections, with their God(s) whispering in the margins.

No fist in this young man’s pocket. Just church-sanctioned piety and a handy vial of holy water for a baptismal occasion.

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Watch the trailer here. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara will launch on VOD and digital platforms on July 2.