One God, two families

Kidnapped
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Certificate 12a, 135 minutes
Released 26 April

This Italian drama, based on true events, is set when the papacy was both the head of the Roman Catholic Church and the state authority in parts of Italy, a situation that would change with Italian unification in the 1870s and the instigation of a secular, country-wide system of government. There would be implications for the separation of Church and state.

In 1858, six-year-old Jewish boy Edgardo Mortalo (Enea Sala) was removed from his family by the papist authorities following his Catholic baptism (how he was baptised emerges later) and taken to a school run directly by Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon) to educate such ‘Christians’ in the faith and turn them into priests.

The Church’s theological rationale behind this appalling action is that anyone not baptised as a Catholic is destined for limbo, and effectively lost, while those baptised into the Catholic faith are in the care of the Church and should accordingly be raised as Catholics to ensure their place in heaven in the next life.

The boy’s father, Momolo (Fausto Russo Alesi), and mother, Marianna (Barbara Ronchi), are devout Jews, raising their nine children accordingly. The boy promises to remain true to Judaism, but confronted with a Catholic environment, daily recitals of Latin liturgy and statues of Jesus Christ, who ‘was killed by the Jews’, his ‘conversion’ is only a matter of time.

Or so it seems, because as his parents attempt to get him back, Edgardo is clearly conflicted between his old and new families, his old and new religious faiths. This is not about a mature Jew voluntarily embracing Christianity by building on their Jewish faith heritage; rather, we witness a boy separated by force from Judaism to enter the rival religion of Catholicism. When the boy becomes an adult (Leonardo Maltese) and a committed Catholic priest, the conflict between the two faiths festers beneath the surface.

Extremely well researched in terms of historical events and also its understanding of Judaism and Catholicism, Kidnapped paints a terrifying picture of a specific incident of antisemitism perpetrated by the Catholic Church of the day. It is a remarkable film, if challenging to watch.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. jeremycprocessing.com

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This is an extract from an article published in the April 2024 edition of Reform

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