134 min | NR | May 24, 2024 | Cohen Media Group
In 1858 Bologna, papal police seize a six-year-old Jewish boy because a servant secretly baptized him as an infant. The Church says a baptized child belongs to the Church, and the Pope keeps him. Marco Bellocchio turns a single act of theft into a portrait of an institution that mistakes cruelty for love.
Edgardo Mortara is the Jewish son of a merchant family in Bologna when papal authorities take him from his home. A Catholic servant baptized him in secret as a sick infant, and under Church law a baptized child cannot be raised by Jews. Pope Pius IX brings the boy to Rome and raises him as a Catholic ward of the Church. Marco Bellocchio frames this not as a courtroom fight over custody but as a study of how doctrine manufactures its own justice. The real subject is conversion as conquest. The film watches an institution absorb a child and call the theft an act of grace.
Enea Sala plays young Edgardo as a boy who learns to survive by performing the faith forced on him. He recites Latin prayers with the blank obedience of someone who has stopped expecting rescue. Leonardo Maltese takes over as the older Edgardo and shows a man so thoroughly remade that he defends his captors. Paolo Pierobon plays Pius IX with paternal warmth that curdles into petulance, a Pope who treats the boy as both trophy and pet. Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi play the parents Momolo and Marianna with a grief that hardens into exhausted persistence over years of legal pleading. Their scenes register the slow erosion of hope.
Bellocchio and co-writer Susanna Nicchiarelli build the film around ritual and repetition. The screenplay returns again and again to baptism, catechism, and confession until the rites feel less like worship than machinery. The cinematography by Francesco Di Giacomo lights the Vatican interiors in heavy chiaroscuro that swallows the boy in shadow and gilds the men who hold him. Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s score swells with liturgical force during the abductions, scoring the violence as if it were a sacrament. One dream sequence shows Edgardo prying the nails from a crucifix, a single image that carries the film’s whole argument about a faith imposed by force.
This is a film about the violence that hides inside certainty. The Church does not see itself as cruel. It sees itself as saving a soul, and that conviction is what makes it monstrous. Bellocchio refuses to give Edgardo a clean escape or a tidy redemption because history did not offer one. He builds a period drama about a vanished world and trusts the audience to recognize that the logic which stole the boy never fully died.