Kidnapped review – Marco Bellocchio’s antisemitism drama is a classic in the making

Based on the true story of a young Jewish boy kidnapped by papal authorities, this is a full-tilt melodrama that lays bare tyranny, bigotry and the abuse of power in the Catholic church

Cannes is this year becoming a counterblast to ageism. Italian director Marco Bellocchio, at the age of 83 – and almost 60 years after he first came to prominence with his 1965 movie Fists in the Pocket – has created a gripping, heartbreaking true-political crime story from the pages of history. It is a full-tilt melodrama with the passionate vehemence of Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens, which lays bare an ugly formative episode of Europe’s Catholic church: an affair of antisemitism and child abuse.

It is based on the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish child in Bologna who, in 1858, when he was six, was taken away from his family by the papal authorities. This was done because Edgardo’s doting Catholic nursemaid had claimed that when Edgardo was a baby, and apparently in dire sickness, she had presumed to carry out an emergency baptism, because she feared Edgardo would die and go to limbo. The fanatical Inquisition authorities affected to believe that the Jewish family would therefore “sacrifice” the now-Catholic child, and jumped at the chance to punish the Jewish community and inflate their own missionary self-importance. Edgardo, extensively brainwashed, grew up to be a priest and vehement partisan of the church.