‘Kidnapped’ Review: Marco Bellocchio’s Grandiose View of a 19th Century Vatican Scandal

Marco Bellocchio excels at grand gestures. The Italian title of the filmmaker’s latest, Kidnapped, appears on screen in large, blood-red letters, like the screaming headline of a tabloid news article. Yet it’s placed over a deceptively serene scene, circa the late-1850s, of servant woman Anna Morisi (Aurora Camatti) strolling into a store across the street from her Bologna-residing employers, the Jewish Mortara family. The clashing juxtaposition of words and images is apt, for none of the characters suspects that history is about to be made.

The Mortara case is one of the most egregious stains on the legacy of the Catholic Church. It captured the world’s attention at a particularly fraught moment, right as the Papal States (occupied Italian territories that had for centuries been under the direct rule of successive popes) were close to permanent dissolution, and global antisemitism was on a genocidal rise.

In the midst of these historical maelstroms lived a boy named Edgardo—played by Enea Sala as a juvenile and Leonardo Maltese as a young adult—who Morisi clandestinely baptized when she believed the infant child was near death from illness. (A local shopkeep instructed her how to perform the ritual.) Several years later, the church became aware of the situation and under order of the pope, Mortara was forcibly taken from his home to be raised in Rome as a Catholic.

Bellocchio treats the tale as an unabashed melodrama, one kept at a stress-inducing simmer with occasional surges of operatic emotion. The key scene comes early, when the freshly abducted Edgardo is loaded onto a boat by his captors. He’s been a screaming wreck up to this point, but as Francesco DiGiacomo’s camera holds on his face, it stiffens into a chillingly opaque expression. Ripped from his familiar life, the young Mortara has become a suggestible non-person, more readily able to be molded by whoever proves to be the prevailing influence.

For a while, Edgardo’s mother, Marianna (Barbara Ronchi), and father, Salomone (Fausto Russo Alesi), already parents to a sizeable brood of sons and daughters, seem like they might have a fighting chance against the Holy See. The Jewish prayers that Marianna taught Edgardo remain in his heart and mind (he whispers them secretively at night), and Salomone does everything in his power, through means both lawful and illicit, to bring the case to light.

Marianna turns out to be stronger than Salomone in pinpointing the enigmatic Edgardo’s evolving state of mind. In one of the most upsetting scenes in the film, Marianna is granted a supervised visit with her son, and slowly encourages him to drop the indoctrinated act that he’s been putting on for his captors. The tear-soaked embrace and violent separation that follows is pure Bellocchio in its zero-to-100 fervor, something equally apparent in a later sequence in which Salomone, having come to the end of an exhaustingly unproductive trial for one of Edgardo’s kidnappers, lets loose with a prolonged, horrifically guttural howl.

The parents’ attempts to reclaim their son just makes the Catholic Church and its leader, the perpetually grousing Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon), triple their brainwashing efforts. Pius is introduced poring over political cartoons that satirize both his policies and appearance, the newspaper caricatures jauntily coming to animated life with Looney Tunes-esque musical backing. Bellocchio has a lot of fun illustrating the pope’s aggrieved and paranoid mindstate, no more so than in a bawdily blasphemous nightmare scene wherein a group of mohel perform a vengeful bris on His Holiness. Yet Pius eventually emerges as the formidable father figure who completes Edgardo’s conversion from defiant Jew to obsequious Catholic.

One of the most unnerving anecdotes of the Mortara story involves a game of hide-and-seek during which Edgardo conceals himself underneath Pius’s robes, and the pope eventually parting them like an impresario to reveal his young charge between his legs. It’s indeed a pivotal moment in Kidnapped, though the innate perversity of the display is strangely muted, as it is in another scene in which Edgardo removes the nails from the hands and feet of a Christ statue and imagines the son of God descending from the cross, a conceptually sublime vision that would have benefitted from a more potently sacrilegious charge. One can’t help but wonder how Steven Spielberg—who was attached to direct an ultimately aborted Edgardo Mortara movie from a screenplay by Tony Kushner—might have handled such material.

Kidnapped may sometimes tread a little too close to a palatable prestige drama. Yet as in his late-career masterwork, The Traitor, Bellocchio often uses middlebrow signifiers as aesthetic Trojan Horses, lulling his audience just enough so that the physical and psychological violence, when it comes, hits with a brute force that feels equally rooted in cinema and theater.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Kidnapped’s astonishing finale, in which the grown Edgardo goes to visit his mother on her deathbed and attempts to convert her to Catholicism. Bellocchio synthesizes multiple artistic modes in this section: to-the-rafters performances; provocative breaking of the fourth wall (one character’s accusatory glance is perceptible even though their face is concealed beneath a sheet); and a stylized final tableaux that puts mother and son at opposite ends of what looks, via the expert framing, like the proscenium of a grand auditorium. The far-reaching consequences of a family torn asunder by a morally and spiritually self-righteous cabal are thus laid bare in all their agony and ecstasy.