We know of Marco Bellocchio’s propensity to approach Italian history, not as a memoirist or a novelist, but as a psychoanalyst, tirelessly tracing the thread of the country’s collective unconscious, to isolate traumas, neuroses, blockages. The Abduction is no exception to the rule, and we are first blown away by the Olympic form of the 83-year-old filmmaker, who has just released several major works such as The Traitor (2019) and the five and a half hours of Esterno notte (2022) to this new feature film, no less ambitious.
The mini-series Esterno notte looked back on the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades at the height of the years of lead, the scene of which was similar, for Italian democracy, to the murder of the father. The Rapture this time turns towards the Church as “bad mother”, a jealous and abusive authority committed to a fundamentalist slope, at the precise moment when its temporal power was beginning to crack.
The scene opens in 1858 in Bologna, when the city still belonged to the Papal States, when a 7-year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, was taken from his family in the middle of the night, on the orders of the inquisitor priest, and taken to Rome in the college of catechumens attached to the Holy See, in the bosom of Pope Pius IX. His father, Momolo, will go out of his way to get him back, but the pontifical law will remain deaf and inflexible, under the pretext that the boy would have been baptized, by three drops of water sprinkled on the infant’s head by a woman. superstitious girl, six years ago.
The Jewish community is agitated, soliciting, but the pope always gives the same answer – non possumus (“we cannot”), a formula passed down to posterity -, too happy with this decision made against the “deicidal people” (old prejudice). to the thick skin of Christian anti-Semitism). The parents are nevertheless granted permission to visit, to see, to the height of fear, their son moving away from them, easily influenced, incapable of resisting brainwashing, monstrously alienated from Catholic dogma.
Mental trap
This dark episode, very real, caused a stir beyond the Italian borders and the circles concerned, throughout liberal Europe, soliciting its share of caricatures in the press, attempts to exert pressure (the Rothschilds threatened the papacy with sanctions financial), until encountering the revolution in progress against the Risorgimento, the movement for the political unification of Italy, which, in 1870, would bring down the Pope’s fortress ? the plan on the explosion of the Wall The enclosure turns out to be one of the most symbolically speaking in the film.
