2023-11-06 17:23:13
With The Abduction, the Italian maestro Marco Bellocchio at the age of 82 created one of his most powerful films, denouncing the kidnapping of a Jewish child by the Pope, a few years before the birth of Italy in the 19th century.
Pick up (Kidnapped), Marco Bellocchio
Italy, France, Germany (2h15)
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Avec Paolo Pierobon, Fausto Russo, Barbara Ronchi, Enea Sal, Leonardo Maltese.
After the release of the last Ken Loach, “The Old Oak”, 87 years old and the “Boy and the Heron” by Hayao Miyazaki, 82 years old, it is another heavyweight veteran of world cinema, Marco Bellocchio, 83 years old, which gives us with “The Abduction”, a film of maturity and mastery, both narrative and aesthetic. The Italian Maestro continues to revisit official Italian history by delivering here a breathtaking and heartbreaking film which returns to an episode long forgotten but which hit the headlines in 1858, a few years before the “Risogimento” which saw the birth of the Modern Italy: the forced kidnapping from his family of young Edgardo Mortara, 7 years old, under the pretext that he was baptized in secret by his nanny as a baby and that, from then on, he became a Christian and must therefore be removed literally to his Jewish family to be protected by the Church, all-powerful at the time. The Mortara family will do everything to make the institution reverse its decision, in vain, and this fact, not so diverse, will cause a scandal in the Italian press but also throughout Europe and the entire world.
Goliath terrasse David
The film begins in the darkness, from which armed men emerge. The original Italian title “Rapito” is much closer to the reality of the film’s story, that of a brutal and unexpected kidnapping. A title enhanced by the alliteration “Rapito Rapido” which immediately comes to mind, adding in substance the lightning violence with which this child will be torn away forever in the instant of one night from his parents. What followed for the family was a series of disappointed hopes, latent humiliation and rampant anti-Semitism in the face of an unalterable ideological bloc, which cannot call into question even one of its most absurd dogmas ( a sign of the cross placed on the forehead with a wet finger is enough to make a man a Catholic for eternity), and preferred to commit a crime in the name of an absolute and inalienable principle. The first part of the film dissects this fight of David against Goliath, but which will turn in favor of absolutism and powerful clerics, with the Pope in the lead. Marco Bellocchio is not a moralist, as he has shown in most of his recent films (“The Traitor”) or older films (“The Devil in the Body”), but rather a witness to History with great H, the one that silently crushes individuals.
Pius IX, this ogre who saw himself as patriarch
The whole interest of the film also lies in the shift which gradually takes place over the course of the film. From the story of a torn family, we move on to a chiaroscuro portrait with the many gray areas of a child who will grow up with doubt and the original tearing of his roots. Is he the Jewish child robbed of his parents and his religious heritage, or is he on the contrary a child saved precisely from impiety and welcomed into the security of the dominant faith? The filmmaker does not position himself as a redeeming artist or a lesson giver, and that is the miracle of the film: to show without judging, leaving this part to doubt and the unspeakable. Recruited then proselytized, struck by Stockholm syndrome which caused him to be ordained a priest under the name of… Pius, Edgardo’s life will remain a mystery. But the tutelary shadow of Pius IX is more that of an ogre than of a patriarch, at a pivotal period which will mark ten years later the end of the Papal States (which will become the tiny city of the Vatican) and the temporal power of the Popes, event on which the film ends. From now on, Italy will no longer be under the thumb of ecclesiastics, at least with regard to the law of men.
An eminently political and contemporary film on all forms of totalitarianism of thought which confuse religion and politics, the word of God and the interpretation of men of power who constantly appeal to their beliefs to serve their interests and passions. A historical film, but it couldn’t be more topical.
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