< 'Kidnapped' tells the historical horror story of an abducted Jewish child

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The new Italian film "Kidnapped" tells the true story of how a young Jewish boy was taken away from his parents by the Catholic Church. The film was made by the celebrated director Marco Bellocchio. Our critic-at-large John Powers says it's a strong, often surprising film that uses a historical incident to raise issues that are of the moment.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: From India and Eastern Europe to the Middle East and America, we're living through days of powerful, often violent religious feeling. Stories that might have felt like old, dead history now take on a stinging new relevance. That's the case with "Kidnapped: The Abduction Of Edgardo Mortara," the ferocious true story of a young Jewish boy forcibly taken from his parents by emissaries of the pope. It was made by Marco Bellocchio, the great Italian filmmaker who first burst on the scene 59 years ago with his scorched-earth debut, "Fists In The Pocket."

Now 84 but still far from mellow, Bellocchio takes us back to the 19th century to tell a historical horror story steeped in Roman Catholic antisemitism. The action begins in 1850s Bologna, which was then under the rule of the unpopular and highly conservative Pope Pius IX. The just-born Edgardo Mortara is the sixth son of a Jewish Bolognese family, whose housemaid, unbeknownst to them, baptizes the baby to save his soul.

When the Church's inquisitor in Bologna learns of this baptism six years later, he declares Edgardo a Christian. And because it's illegal for non-Christians to raise a Christian child, he grabs the 6-year-old boy away from his agonized parents and ships him to Rome. There as he yearns for his mother, Edgardo is put into a boarding school for the children of converted Jews, where he's surrounded by images of the crucifixion.

Naturally, Edgardo's parents are shattered and do everything they can to get him back, even waging a huge international PR campaign. Going to Rome, they make heartrending appeals to stony-faced priests who say they understand their sadness, but can do nothing to alleviate it. After all, they're helping the boy become a proper Christian. To avoid seeming politically weak, Pius refuses the world's calls for Edgardo's freedom. In fact, he doubles down on the kidnapping, personally guiding the boy's Catholic education, and having him baptized a second time.

Although "Kidnapped" is a straightforward historical drama about religious oppression, Edgardo's tale is filled with startling twists and turns. Especially when in 1860, nationalist rioters overthrow Pius the IX's rule in Bologna. With new people in charge, the Bologna inquisitor is arrested for the kidnapping, and we see how Edgardo has fallen through one of the trapdoors of history. Had he simply been born a few years later, he wouldn't have been taken from his Jewish home and forcibly made a Christian. Even as the rebels go after the Pope, we keep worrying about Edgardo's fate in Rome.

What happens to a young Jewish boy who's cut off from his family and trained not just to be a good Catholic, but to become a priest? What core of the original Edgardo remains? Who does he become as he moves into manhood? The answers are unsettling. Now at moments, "Kidnapped" feels old-fashioned. Yet Bellocchio never falls into boring costume drama realism. Working in a painterly style, he pushes things toward the operatic, laying on surging music, endowing Edgardo with innocent good looks that border on the angelic, and having actor Paolo Pierobon play Pope Pius as a kind of opera buffa figure, hammy in a Marlon Brando sort of way, at once silly and creepy and sinister.

In one of the film's best scenes, Edgardo has a hallucinatory encounter with a crucifix that directly answers the falsehood that the Jews killed Christ. Like me, Bellocchio was raised a Roman Catholic, and he's clearly appalled by the Church's cruelty to the Mortara family and to all Jews, whom they treated as inferiors who must literally kiss the Pope's feet for decent treatment. He wants us to be appalled and angry, too.

Yet what gives the movie its timely resonance is not merely its depiction of antisemitism, but what it shows about the dangerous politics of religious belief. Although religion officially deals in timeless universal truths, "Kidnapped" reminds us that these timeless universals are always bound up with historical questions of power, and where there's power, there will be abuse.

MOSLEY: Critic-at-large John Powers reviewed the film "Kidnapped." If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our conversation with journalist and professor Rachel Somerstein on the history and controversies surrounding C-sections or with revered cellist Yo-Yo Ma on his career and learning his first Bach solo cello suite at 4 years old, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations on what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.

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