A Little More Cannes (InRO reviews) (Patreon)

Kidnapped (Marco Bellocchio, 2023)

In many critics’ wrap-ups from Cannes, there was a dismissive attitude toward Ken Loach’s film The Old Oak. As is often the case with late Loach, the consensus has been that the director’s heart (and politics) may be in the right place, but he sacrifices nuance in the name of agit-prop. The same can be said for Marco Bellocchio, at least where his new film is concerned. Kidnapped is a florid docudrama based on the case of Edgardo Mortara (Enea Sala), a six-year-old boy from a Jewish family in Bologna. Edgardo was surreptitiously baptized by the family’s servant (Aurora Camatti) as an infant. Per canon law in what was then the Papal State of Italy, this meant that the Vatican had a legal right – and in their eyes, a moral obligation – to remove Edgardo from the Mortara family and raise him as a Catholic.

Bellocchio has indicated that this is a story he’s wanted to film for quite a while, and the appearance of Kidnapped in 2023 seems hardly coincidental. Bellocchio’s cinema has long exhibited a simultaneous fascination and repulsion with respect to the Catholic church, particularly as seen in films like My Mother’s Smile (2002) and Blood of My Blood (2015). His films have succeeded at showing why religion exerts such a pull on the human psyche, despite the violence and social division that it often engenders. By contrast, Kidnapped is an outright attack on the Italian Catholic church of the second half of the 19th century, embodied by the glowering, fanatical Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon). In a portrayal that recalls that of Porfirio Diaz in Glauber Rocha’s equally anti-clerical Earth Entranced (1967), the Pope sees the abduction and reeducation of Edgardo as a way for the Vatican to flex its political muscle, the last gasp of a regime on the decline.

Bellocchio’s most interesting films are those that depart from realism, drawing on Italy’s operatic tradition. Never one to shy aware from grand gestures, Bellocchio often juices the drama with crashing music stings and sweeping camera movement. There’s some of that in Kidnapped (especially the deployment of sharp, discordant Bernard Hermannisms), but like his last film The Traitor (2019), Kidnapped finds Bellocchio operating in a rather conventional register. When he crosscuts between Edgardo reciting the Latin Mass and his family engaging in a Hebrew prayer, it’s a bludgeoning maneuver. Even Kidnapped’s flights of fancy – Edgardo freeing Christ from the cross, of the Pope being forcibly circumcised by a quartet of menacing mohels – are restricted to dream sequences.

Kidnapped is a film whose point is impossible to miss. Religion becomes dangerous when it succumbs to fundamentalism, and this is never more the case than when the church and the state are one. Bellocchio clearly recognizes the existential threat of Christian nationalism, and that a new Medievalism is on the rise. The adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) becomes a priest and fully embraces Christianity (not that he had much choice). But in a moment of emotional crisis, a schism occurs in his mind, and he suddenly condemns the Pope. Fundamentalism is a kind of schizophrenia, at odds with lived reality. This essential trauma, and its irrational rupture, would have been a great subject for Bellocchio at his best. Instead, he’s preaching to his historical moment, hammering home ideas that he has, in his anger, greatly simplified.

Homecoming (Catherine Corsini, 2023)

Two years ago, French director Catherine Corsini was in Cannes’ Competition lineup with The Divide, a film that used the deteriorating marriage of two well-heeled Parisian women as a frame of reference for considering the “Yellow Vest” protests of 2018. However well-intended Corsini’s cinematic activism may have been, The Divide was an insufficient response to the French political climate, largely because of her choice of protagonists. It was as if Corsini understood the need to overcome her bourgeois point of view, but simply couldn’t do it. Homecoming is a small step in the right direction, but again Corsini organizes her protagonists’ complex reality through a blinkered upper-class perspective. The fact that Homecoming has more on its mind than The Divide did only makes its shortcomings that much more regrettable.

Corsini once again works with Aissatou Diallo Sagna, the former medical worker whose first acting role was as a beleaguered nurse in The Divide. Here, she plays Kheìdidja, a French-Senegalese woman with two daughters, college-bound Jessica (Suzy Bemba) and 15-year-old troublemaker Farah (Esther Gohourou). In the opening moments of Homecoming, we see a flashback to Kheìdidja preparing to leave Corsica with her kids, when she receives a phone call with tragic news. Her Corsican husband has just died in a car accident. In the present day, she and the kids are traveling back to Corsica for the first time since their departure, and Jessica and Farah hope to learn more about their late father. But this desire is complicated by a series of family secrets that Kheìdidja has never managed to address.

Although Homecoming is shot in a rather uninflected realist mode, one immediately notices that once in Corsica, Kheìdidja and her girls are literally hard to see. The underlit cinematography allows them to almost disappear into the scenery. There has been a fairly extensive discourse regarding the chemistry and light sensitivity of Western image-making technologies, suggesting an ideological bias towards the accurate rendering of white skin. But one gets the sense that Corsini is intentionally cloaking her protagonists in twilight, to suggest their marginality. Homecoming is steeped in conflicting signals regarding race, class, and ethnicity, but there’s an underlying conservatism at work in this film. Perhaps without meaning to, Corsini suggests that despite these characters’ intersectional identities, and the changing face of Europe more broadly, they can never truly belong to the larger society.

As Kheìdidja explains, she never felt she belonged to her husband’s world, and this was exacerbated when her mother-in-law (Marie-Ange Geronimi) blames her for her son’s death. This inability to thrive in the white world is repeated when the family returns to Corsica. Jessica starts a relationship with Gaia (Lomane de Dietrich), the daughter of Kheìdidja’s wealthy employers, while Farah is antagonized, then befriended, by a causally racist local boy (Jean Michelangelini). Corsini creates a scenario wherein Kheìdidja, Jessica, and Farah are able to begin new phases in their lives, but in the end they all return to the family they know, the three of them against the world. Their flirtation with European whiteness is tragic, nearly deadly.

Corsini seems to be attempting to examine the personal fallout from various historical forms of oppression: racism, colorism, classicism, and homophobia. However, simply grazing these issues is not the same as producing an analysis. Homecoming ends by curtailing cultural hybridity in favor of self-separation, as if her characters’ desires for something larger are little more than expressions of internalized colonial consciousness. In true bourgeois fashion, Corsini depicts a multiculturalism defined by tolerance and coexistence, which sounds fine until you realize what that actually entails. We only encounter one another in passing, and no one ever has to learn, grow, or change.