“The Abduction”, by Marco Bellocchio: our review

Dhe assassination of Aldo Moro, Marco Bellocchio made a fascinating film (Buongiorno, note, 2003) and a masterful series (Esterno note, 2022). Another era, another kidnapping, another national earthquake, Pick up narrates the tearing of a Jewish child from his family by the brigades of the Pope-King, in 1858. Baptized in secret, when he was a baby, by a servant worried about the salvation of his soul, Edgardo Mortara, 6 years old, becomes “Christian for eternity”. And, despite a worldwide scandal, the pampered hostage of a Pius IX with declining temporal power.

The maestro creates a hell of a film, a story of brainwashing that turns into Stockholm syndrome. The child patiently converted into a priest will abandon his mother’s faith for that of the Holy Father. It is of course for the Church that Bellocchio, forever a slayer of institutions, reserves his barbs, a trial, and even a strange nightmare when the Pope fantasizes about his bed surrounded by rabbis who have come to circumcise him against his will.

Once again intertwining the intimate and the political, the filmmaker constructs captivating mirror scenes: the mother hiding her son under her skirts to keep him from his kidnappers; the pope hiding him under his red habit to help him in a game of hide and seek. When it’s not making sharp humor, the film proceeds with operatic movements, with violins over images of horses galloping in the night, heartbreaking accents on the mother ordered to flee or on the father in despair. Powerfully orchestrated, these emotional ascents prove to be unstoppable heartbreakers.