Kidnapped (2023, Marco Bellocchio) (Patreon)

50/100

Wasn't previously familiar with this horrific bit of 19th-century Italian history, and was properly appalled...though I had my standard atheist's problem with films about religion, such that I kept ungraciously thinking "Just convert to Catholicism and they'll return your son! Who cares which chunk of blatant nonsense you form your identity around? They're all equally goofy!" Kidnapped's more legitimate problem, though, is its failure to transcend ripped-from-the-(ancient)-headlines melodrama—Edgardo Mortara's is a remarkable and deeply upsetting story, but not inherently a dramatic story, except in the actual seizure. (Fabio Massimo Capogrosso's truly overbearing score does its best to assert otherwise.) I briefly thought that Bellocchio, who also co-wrote the screenplay, might have found a genuinely thought-provoking way of presenting the saga, focusing on human beings' (and especially children’s) almost boundless malleability; though Edgardo cries and shrieks at the moment of physical separation, the new normal seems to take hold almost immediately once he arrives in Rome and begins his tutelage (if that's the word). This is not presented as any kind of Stockholm Syndrome—more like the way that pets quickly adjust to and bond with a new owner (or companion, or whatever the currently acceptable term may be). The film's strongest scene sees Edgardo's father look relieved upon being told that Edgardo is well, whereupon his contact explains that he meant that in a bad way: "They say that he is happy there, that he recites the [Catholic] prayers, and that he doesn't miss you in the slightest." That accords with everything we've seen up to that point, and also fits the historical record quite well (Edgardo became and died a priest), but Bellocchio apparently didn't trust the counterintuitive nature of that psychology, choosing to stage a scene roughly midway through—after the above—in which Edgardo tearfully assures his mother that he still says the Shema every night and begs to go home. Stirring, to be sure, but it badly undermines the work Kidnapped had been doing and then proceeds to do more of, and makes a hash out of the late episode in which a traumautized Edgardo temporarily reverts to his former identity (and then instantly reconverts, I guess). Movie's heavy-handed in general, cross-cutting between Edgardo reciting liturgy and his family praying in Hebrew as if that's not the most hackneyed possible device for this context. Pro tip: If you're not pretty knowledgeable about Italy's reunification, give the Wikipedia entry a skim beforehand. Otherwise you'll be as confused as I was when the Papal States seem to have been vanquished but someone says "We'll free him when we free Rome."