Maven's Nest
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True story of one boy and his family dramatically brings to life an antisemitic period of Italian history not familiar to most American audiences
By Nora Lee Mandel
Kidnapped (Rapito)
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Written by Marco Bellocchio, Susanna Nicchiarelli in collaboration with Edoardo Albinati, Daniela Ceselli
Produced by Simone Gattoni and Beppe Caschetto
Italy, France, Germany. In Italian and Hebrew with English subtitles, with a smattering of Yiddish
134 mins. Not Rated.
With: Paolo Pierobon, Fausto Russo Alesi, Barbara Ronchi, Enea Sala, Leonardo Maltese, Fabrizio Gifuni and Filippo Timi
In U.S. theaters May 24, 2024 by Cohen Media Group
Kidnapped dramatically plunges us into a period of Italian history (and a cast) not familiar to most American audiences. In the 1850’s, the city of Bologna was part of the Papal States, and Pope Pius IX was the King of this central Italian theocracy, controlling soldiers and the revived Inquisition. Jews were still under the most restrictions in Western Europe.
The story opens in 1852 Bologna where the number of Jews was too few to support a rabbi. At a time when Christians weren’t supposed to work in Jewish households, a flirtatious maid sneaks back from her lover through a door with a mezuzah on its frame and is spooked by seeing her employers say Hebrew blessings over their six-month-old infant.
Six years later, these devout Mortaras are settling into their evening bedtime routines when soldiers charge in to inspect their nine children. The captain announces he has orders from the Holy Office of the Inquisitor to seize seven-year-old Edgardo because he has been baptized. He refuses to say by whom and when this ritual the shocked parents don’t understand was performed. The eldest son alerts their relatives and amidst the uproar the distraught father Momolo (Fausto Russo Alesi) picks up his small son to throw him out the window to their waiting arms. He relents to hug the boy, and Edgardo (the cherubic Enea Sala) runs under the skirts of his warmly affectionate mother Marianna (Barbara Ronchi). They successfully beg for a one-day deferment.
Jewish leaders meet to find a solution, where an elder warns the Inquisitor “is worse than Pharoah”. Dominican friar Pier Gaetano Feletti (Fabrizio Gifuni), the local representative of the Roman Inquisition, rejects the entreaties of “the perfidious Jews”. Mortara persists in trying to determine the facts; the film follows him pursue a legalistic resolution for years, but omits his imprisonment for his efforts. The emotional mother tries to shield Edgardo in her bed and makes sure he can repeat the daily Sh’ma prayer. Behind the swift soldiers, the anxious family loses sight of Edgardo in the misty night as he is switched from carriage to boat. Cinematographer Francesco Di Giacomo wonderfully shows this journey through the child’s eyes.
Italian director Marco Bellocchio was inspired by Daniele Scalise’s book Il caso Mortara (2023), that is not yet in English, and the historical consultant is philosopher Pina Totaro, a Spinoza expert. Historian David Kertzer’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997) renewed interest in the case, such that over the years Steven Spielberg considered a film adaptation. Perhaps Spielberg would have focused on the Jewish perspective. Bellocchio looks more at the Catholic Church as Edgardo experienced it, shielded under the skirts of a Pope who insisted he was the bright child’s new father, and the nationalistic furor he inflamed.
Edgardo’s mother gave him a Hebrew amulet for protection, but at the church in Rome he is immediately bestowed a cross and introduced to Jesus Christ bleeding on the cross as a Jew who was killed by the Jews. We enter Edgardo’s confused dreams when he is placed in a dormitory with other Jewish children who have been separated from their families for various reasons, including poverty and illness. Their parents have to convert in order to see them again.
The retrogressive Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon) is annoyed the Mortaras reached out to the wider Jewish world that lobbied governments throughout Europe and America via the modern secular press in one of the first international human rights campaigns. He angrily views a pile of mocking editorial cartoons that he imagines in animation. When the Rothschild bank is reported to suggest the Church’s substantial loans could be affected unless Edgardo is returned, the Pope spitefully revenges on Rome’s Jewish community for a humiliation that is difficult to watch.
- Kidnapped still by Anna_Camerlingo courtesy of Cohen Media
The political pressure against what the subtitle calls “The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara” allows the Mortaras to finally talk to their son. Even in the highly structured visit, his memories of family are awakened by his mother’s love, only to be forcibly brainwashed again. To Fabio Massimo Capograsso’s operatic score, revolution for Italian unity swirls around the Pope now seen as fallible, rigid, and arbitrary, with resentments continuing after his death.
Edgardo’s parents and siblings keep trying to approach him while he grows to adulthood (played by Leonardo Maltese). With the fervor of a convert, he reaches out to his embittered mother. The epilogue notes his long life – living until just before the Nazi invasion would have confronted the conundrum of whether he was Jewish.
In 2000, Mortara descendants protested the beatification of Pope Pius IX. Kidnapped vividly portrays the historic impact of antisemitism that is personal and systemic.
5/20/2024
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
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My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
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