THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
We know of Marco Bellocchio’s propensity to approach Italian history, not as a memoirist or a novelist, but as a psychoanalyst, tirelessly tracing the thread of the country’s collective unconscious, to isolate traumas, neuroses, blockages. Pick up is no exception to the rule, and we are first amazed by the Olympic form of the 83-year-old filmmaker, who has just released several major works such as The traitor (2019) and the five thirty hours ofEsterno note (2022) to this new feature film, no less ambitious.
The mini-series Esterno note returned to the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades at the height of the Years of Lead, the scene of which was similar, for Italian democracy, to the murder of the father. Pick up this time turns to the Church as a “bad mother”, a jealous and abusive authority committed to a fundamentalist slope, at the precise moment when its temporal power was beginning to crack.
The scene opens in 1858 in Bologna, when the city still belonged to the Papal States, when a 7-year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, was taken from his family in the middle of the night, on the orders of the inquisitor priest, and taken to Rome in the college of catechumens attached to the Holy See, in the bosom of Pope Pius IX. His father, Momolo, will go out of his way to get him back, but the pontifical law will remain deaf and inflexible, under the pretext that the boy would have been baptized, by three drops of water sprinkled on the infant’s head by a woman. good superstitious girl, six years earlier.
The Jewish community is agitated, soliciting, but the pope always gives the same response − non possumus (“we cannot”), a formula passed down to posterity -, only too happy to take this decision against the “deicidal people” (an old prejudice with the hard skin of Christian anti-Semitism). The parents are nevertheless granted permission to visit, to see, to the height of fear, their son moving away from them, easily influenced, incapable of resisting brainwashing, monstrously alienated from Catholic dogma.
Mental trap
This dark episode, very real, caused a stir beyond the Italian borders and the circles concerned, throughout liberal Europe, soliciting its share of caricatures in the press, attempts to exert pressure (the Rothschilds threatened the papacy with sanctions financial), until encountering the revolution in progress against the Risorgimento, the movement for the political unification of Italy, which, in 1870, would bring down the Pope’s fortress − the plan on the explosion of the Wall of The enclosure turns out to be one of the most symbolically speaking in the film.
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