Always fascinated by those who fight against power (political, ecclesiastical or family, it doesn’t matter), even if victory doesn’t always put a smile on the faces of the challengers, Marco Bellocchio seems to reverse his point of view this time: kidnapped is rather the story of a “defeat” than a fight, but maybe that’s why it’s even more interesting. Little Edgardo Mortara, snatched from the Jewish family because he was secretly baptized by his wet nurse (we are in 1858), doesn’t even look like a new David fighting with Pope Goliath. The spiritual and temporal power of Pius IX. immediately proves to be invincible and the “non possumus” he pronounces in the face of the demand for the child’s return becomes the synthesis of an unassailable force in the film. But no less remarkable for it. And the beautiful idea of the film then becomes a shadow, a daily discovery as seven-year-old Edgardo is accompanied in betraying his original faith and love for his family.
They make the most of their culture and visual elegance (lots of image quotes) and have a cast that’s truly in a state of mercy (from little Enea Sala to Barbara Ronchi’s angry mother and Fausto Russo’s grieving father alesi). But all deserve a mention: Maltese, Gifuni, Pierobon, Calabresi, Timi, Camatti, Teneggi), the film brings back scene after scene the complexity of a relationship of subservience far more nuanced than that of the servant-master, without wanting to seem ideological choices (Mortara remained adamantly Catholic as an adult) but intelligently shed light on the depths and weaknesses of the human soul.
An operation that Wes Anderson doesn’t even dare with his Asteroid City. The director enjoys telling how a playwright sums up a play that we also see staged and is fascinated by its imagery without depth, its dialogues without construct, its catwalk of famous faces to illustrate its usual superficial and unnecessary world, in which one must be content with a faint touch of irony about the American way of life.