Review: “Kidnapped”
New popes tend to be met with enthusiasm, but when Jews describe the history of the papacy, the story is vastly more complicated and problematic. Kidnapped by director Marco Bellocchio, is not the work of a Jewish filmmaker, but the story it tells is deeply sympathetic.
At the absolute center is Edgardo Mortara, sweetly played by Enea Sala. Born into a family of Bolognese Jews, he is surreptitiously baptized by his Catholic nursemaid. The child is an angel; she is lusty and good-humored, but motivated by an elemental religious zeal. When Edgardo falls ill, she believes that baptism will save him. Lo and behold, he comes back to life.
The problem is that he is now a focus of interest. By the oppressive standards of canon law, Edgaro has crossed a metaphysical border: he can no longer be raised by his Jewish family. Unless they convert, he must be spirited away, to be educated in an institution called the Casa dei Catecumeni, a home for abducted Jewish children. With one exception, the students remain virtually faceless, but all, presumably, have been kidnapped by the Church. The rest of the film traces the complications. The boy eventually becomes a pet of the pope and is ushered into the priesthood and a lifetime of alienation. Nothing can restore the ties of family and origin.
Bellochio is nothing if not a partisan critic. The local authority in Bologna is the glowering Pier Gaetano Feletti, a pasteboard inquisitor who cannot be entreated. Little Edgaro is a prize for the Church, and the claims of the family are mere distractions. Pope Pius IX is, if anything, worse. He is charmed by the child and his ready intellect, but infuriated by the opposition the abduction evokes. This is the final gasp of a declining papacy, but he is determined to defend his authority to the end. Eventually, the struggle seems to rot him from within. His physical ruination is repulsive and extreme.
Regrettably, the Jews are similarly flattened. All move through the film stooped and cringing. They resort to the strategies of pre-modern Jews: pleading, bribery, and political manipulation. With some success, they mount a campaign in the press, but the most vivid scenes are physically painful to watch; at a crucial moment, they crawl to the pope, kissing the velvet instep of his slippers.
And yet just ahead is the secular assault on the papacy and the tentative emergence of political Zionism. The film makes the case that the Church defeated the Mortaras, but could not control the course of history. Indeed, the abduction of Edgardo endangered its survival.
Ultimately that feels like the point of the film: a lesson in Italian political history. The artistic price is one-dimensional characters—the smoldering Jewess, the evil churchman, the angelic child, the bereaved father—who can only bring the project to a kind of partial life. The scenery is beautiful, individual passages are mesmerizing, but the whole is more instructional than moving.