The Controversy of Bellocchio’s Kidnapped

After the infant Edgardo Mortara is secretly baptized by a devout maid in Bologna, Italy, the boy at age six is taken from his Jewish family to be raised Christian, according to Pope Pius XI’s edict to ensure the Church’s authority. It’s 1858, the era when Italy, divided between secular territories and Papal States, struggled to unify. Edgardo (portrayed by baby-faced child actor Enea Sala) is forced to convert to Catholicism and suffers several traumas: First, he undergoes a confused separation from his siblings and parents; then, as a young man (portrayed by delicately sensitive Leonardo Maltese), he feels displaced by religious orientation and conflicting ethnic loyalties. These travails make Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara a psychological epic of extraordinary richness. Its cultural comedy and spiritual tragedy are an uncanny Millennial mix.

In his 2002 political satire My Mother’s Smile, Bellocchio dealt with filiopietism, the excessive regard of ancestors and tradition. In The Wedding Director (2006), he examined a filmmaker’s self-doubt regarding religious and art customs. These concerns appear in every Bellocchio film, but Kidnapped concentrates his themes with baroque bravura — a phantasmagoric extrapolation of his signature crazy-family subject matter.

The period setting imagines the history that Bellocchio has inherited. The contentious atmosphere is so vividly dramatized that the domestic upheaval of the Mortara clan, and Edgardo’s introduction to an ornate, alien world, have the immediacy of personal experience wryly recalled.

Because Catholic-Marxist Bellocchio’s identification with Edgardo is so idiosyncratic, the film feels hardly Jewish or Catholic. Bellocchio is still a radical, autobiographical filmmaker who challenges all canons — think Luis Buñuel but with a naturally extravagant cinematic gift. George Miller’s hyperactive Furiosa is frenetic, but the filmmaking in Kidnapped (I prefer Rapito, the original Italian title) is truly exciting. Bellocchio’s narrative rhythms ensure that the complicated, fascinating ideas are dramatized through intense, emotive moments and stirring images.

As in his innovative Mussolini biopic Vincere (2010), Bellocchio makes Edgardo’s story buckle and unfurl, matching the youth’s psychological bewilderment to our amazement — blazing red intertitles and quasi-documentary interludes shake up our emotional involvement via aesthetic detachment. Edgardo’s initiation into an uncharted domain feels both mysterious and mythical. Edgardo’s lingering stress from being caught between inherent belonging and estranged orientation suggests Bellocchio’s own dark memory of Catholic upbringing.

Cinematographer Francesco Di Giacomo’s overpowering shadows and mellow light follow the style of chromolithographs, plunging us into the depths of Hebraic and Catholic sects while composer Fabio Massimo Capogrosso highlights the parallel existence of the quizzical and malleable Edgardo. Told that Christ was Jewish, Edgardo imagines himself an effigy of suffering. He’s Bellocchio’s Oliver Twist figure in a startling existential comedy.

Alongside the Dickensian search for love (symbolized when the boy hides under his mother’s skirt, then plays hide-and-seek under the pope’s robe), Edgardo is asked, “What is dogma?” Bellocchio pursues this question through the boy’s religious instruction and his relationship with the autocratic yet skittish pope (Paolo Pierobon). Rapito’s intellectual journey complements Italy’s pre-Risorgimento civil uproar under the shadow of spiritual totems. Edgardo imagines himself removing the nails from Christ’s crucifixion, a scene that evokes Bellocchio’s remarkable In the Name of the Father / Nel Nome del Padre (1972). The subplots of Mother and Father Mortara’s impassioned efforts to reclaim their child are harrowing, contrasted with the discipline of his new father. An accidental (Freudian) offense to the pope requires that Edgardo prostrate himself and kiss the floor three times — a stunning penance and acquiescence.

Bellocchio goes so deep into this political history that he also explores Edgardo’s tragic flaw — the wavering between heritage and pedagogy, belief and skepticism, that resembles his own (profoundly explored in the family documentary Marx Can Wait).

Of Rapito’s three filial, fraternal, and political climaxes, the latter shows teenage Edgardo observing an anti-pope protest on a bridge, then joining the mob. Looking desiccated, with a thin-faced psychotic stare (later, Edgardo exasperates his radicalized brother and his resentful, unforgiving mother), he is Bellocchio’s version of Bertolucci’s The Conformist, letting politics command his pitifully divided soul.

Given the anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic fervor in today’s politics, Kidnapped/Rapito ought to be the year’s most controversial movie. But godless film culture ignores Bellocchio’s visionary ambition. Steven Spielberg had announced interest in filming Edgardo’s story, but it’s unlikely that Spielberg would have brought Bellocchio’s irony — interludes showing the pope’s response to public outcry (he’s alarmed by satirical newspaper political cartoons and has a nightmare fearing his own ritual circumcision). Bellocchio bypasses the ecumenical perspective of the formerly great Spielberg and delves into lifelong conflicts. The pope-caricature scenes dare a Kubrickian cynicism suggesting that Bellocchio holds Edgardo’s grudge and that it’s equal to his empathy with the damaged boy and the unwavering pope.

Bellocchio’s peripatetic style makes for compulsive viewing as it conveys an artist’s religious and political ambivalence. Latter-day Spielberg might have depicted superficial social identity; Rapito compounds the crisis of faith with identity. The discord is unresolved — that’s why the title declares “abduction,” not “inculcate,” “proselytize,” or “indoctrinate.” Rapito is a great, stirring recapitulation of Bellocchio’s own madness.