‘Ecstasy’
Manager: Marco Bellocchio
translators: Filippo Timi, Fabrizio Gifuni, Barbara Ronchi
Year: 2023
Premiere: 12/1/24
★★★★
Marco BellocchioAt 84, he is one of the oldest active filmmakers. In ‘The Abduction’ he recreates a case that occurred in Bologna in 1858, when the city belonged to the Papal States. The penultimate child of nine children of a Jewish couple was baptized without his parents’ knowledge and the Holy See claimed him. “You are now a Christian forever,” the priest told him. The Catholic Church took advantage of any loophole, no matter how small, to fight its ‘enemies’ and convert children of other religious beliefs to Catholicism.
In a harsh opening scene, interrogators arrive at the family’s home and take the little boy away with impunity. The same process of impunity, which Bellocchio films with the mentality and mastery of an entomologist, begins to erase his family roots and beliefs and turn him into an ordinary priest. it’s all brainwashing. But for the director all religions manipulate, the Catholic church is the same as the synagogue, so this It’s not a Manichaean movie with good guys and bad guys. Bellocchio allows himself some liberties: when the boy is placed on a boat at night and in the fog, he appears to be crossing a lagoon of Styx, and in his nightmares, Pope Pius IX Imagine some rabbi entering his bedroom to circumcise him. It’s all very effective, realism and disturbing dreaminess.