RAPITO
Type: psychoanalytic-socio-religious drama
Director: Mark Bellocchio. With Enea Sala, Leonardo Maltese, Paolo Pierobon, Barbara Ronchi, Fausto Rosso Alesi, Fabrizio Gifuni, Filippo Timi
The story of Edgardo Mortara, the Jewish boy who was taken away from his family in 1858 when he was six years old to be educated in the Vatican (he had been secretly baptized by his nanny at six months), offers Bellocchio the opportunity to return to the themes that have crossed his entire cinema – the Church, the Family, the clash with Power – and to decline them from a new perspective, that of a child who is both terrified and bewitched by that power and who will end up totally adhering to it.
As the film alternates moments of dramatic tension “à la Polanski” (when the representative of the Holy Office shows up at the Mortara house to pick up the baby) to others of disturbing charm (the insinuating bond that Pius IX establishes with little Edgardo) while in the background we witness the struggle of the family and the Jewish community against the power of the Vatican (until 1870 the Pope King commanded).
Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi with their “children” in “Kidnapped” (photo by Anna Camerlingo).
A complex picture, where politics is intertwined with religionthe reasons of the newborn Italian state to the Vatican excommunications and a child must try to survive after losing his family and his loved ones, between feelings of guilt and dreams of freedom.
For those who want to see a great author grappling with a forgotten page of history.
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