Kidnapped: Marco Bellocchio’s operatic retelling of a Vatican scandal

At 84 years old, the Italian director Marco Bellocchio is hitting his stride. The director has been working steadily in the decades since his 1965 debut, the darkly comic Fists in the Pocket: in the last couple of years alone he’s directed the superb Netflix series Exterior Night (2022) and now this, his 31st feature film. Kidnapped continues Bellocchio’s fascination with Italian history and the conflicts and contradictions that swirl throughout the bel paese. 

Based on one of those moments in history so bizarre it has to be true, it tells the story of a middle-class Jewish family, the Mortaras, who late one night in 1858 have an unwelcome visit from the local authorities. The police regretfully announce that the Mortaras’ son Edgardo (Enea Sala) was secretly baptised six years earlier and so must be raised a Catholic. 

The chief villain of the piece is Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon), whose authority extends to Bologna as one of the Papal States over which he rules as both a spiritual leader and in effect monarch. With his power threatened by political upheaval, Pius fuses insecurity about his own waning influence with antisemitism. Edgardo’s mother Marianna (Barbara Ronchi) and father Salomone (Fausto Russo Alesi) are offered the impossible choice between converting to Catholicism and losing the boy to the Church. They refuse, and years pass as they fight the Pope through the courts both legal and of public opinion, hampered as much as helped by Jewish leaders who feel the case is upsetting the delicate balance of integration. 

There is a palpable fury at the injustice, as Edgardo (now played by Leonardo Maltese) is taught his catechism and his family exhaust themselves trying to get him back. At times, Bellocchio’s anger leads to some extreme characterisations: Pius’s degeneration from arrogant tyrant to slavering obsessive might be too rich for some viewers. But Bellocchio’s talent is to be able to combine the incisive recreation of a historical moment – the screenplay is co-written with Susanna Nicchiarelli, director of Miss Marx (2020) – with an operatic style, as cameras swoop and plunge through corridors and palazzi. Bellocchio is intent on dialectic and contradictions, showing how the Catholic church roots its power in family and then tears families apart. Bellocchio’s Italy is a country where the Middle Ages lasted well into the 19th century: a place of outrageous flamboyance but also of stoicism and moral courage, cruelty but also empathy – precisely because the Mortara family are as Italian as the Pope. 

► Kidnapped is in UK cinemas now.