A separation: "Kidnapped"

While Luca Guadagnino flaps around, Marco Bellocchio has been quietly, assiduously underlining his claims to the title of Italy's greatest living filmmaker, in large part by disinterring sad, sorry, strangely resonant stories from his homeland's past. (He's like a more professional version of the amateur archaeologists roaming Italy in the current theatrical release La Chimera.) In last year's TV standout Exterior, Night (still streamable in the UK via Channel 4), Bellocchio returned to the site of his own fine 2003 thriller Good Morning, Night, relitigating the kidnap and murder of PM Aldo Moro and finding new things to say about the relationship between politics, the Catholic Church, trust and national neuroses. Now the writer-director travels further back in time - to 19th century Bologna - and comes up with an enveloping parable about faith and division. Kidnapped has the ring of Prince and the Pauper-like fiction, but all its facts have long been on the record: in 1858, representatives of the Catholic Church really did storm the home of a Jewish family, the Mortaras, and seized one of their nine children, seven-year-old Edgardo, after it emerged the boy had previously been baptised by a concerned housemaid - in the Church's eyes rendering the lad a) not kosher, and b) very much one of theirs. In alighting upon such a deplorable example of overreach, Bellocchio reminds us he's one of the last filmmakers working in period drama who means to engender no nostalgia whatsoever - not least because he senses the dark ages, when such stories were an everyday commonplace, aren't as far gone as we sometimes like to kid ourselves. For Bellocchio, history is an ongoing process or work-in-progress: either way, the past won't shut up.

This understanding makes him one of the few filmmakers left who could tell this story this comprehensively, and this well - and it has much to do with his own upbringing: he made his bones before directors started developing selective vision, ADHD and other bad habits. Much of Kidnapped is composed with the same sober classicism as the cathedrals this narrative proceeds through, the writing (credited to Bellocchio and Susanna Nichiarelli, working from Daniele Scalise's book Il caso Mortara) digging further into the story to uncover painful ironies and difficult truths. The initial rupture opens up two lines of narrative inquiry: the efforts of the naturally stunned and aggrieved clan to understand what just happened on their own doorstep, and the adventure of the boy (Enea Sala, later Leonardo Maltese), pulled away from a comfortable mercantile middle-class to be re-educated (reprogrammed, if you like) from scratch. Edgardo gains new pals in those fellow "orphans" with whom he bunks down in a church basement - here, Bellocchio notes this case wasn't some isolated aberration, rather a matter of state-wide policy - but when his clerical guardians start drawing parallels between him and the Jesus depicted in a chapel-wall fresco, it's all we can do not to puncture the hushed silence of the cinema with a loud, ominous uh-oh. Even here, though, Bellocchio regulates light and dark like a true artist; these late works have been painterly - masterly - in a way, say, 1965's scrappy breakthrough Fists in the Pocket wasn't, and he may have a more developed sense of contrast (lit. and fig.) than any of his world-cinema contemporaries. Exterior, Night was positively sepulchral: as I wrote at the time, it wasn't TV you binged so much as entombed yourself within. Kidnapped alights upon a comparably sorrowful story, yet Bellocchio uses the freedoms of the press (animating satirical cartoons showing Pope Pius IX as "the Great Kidnapper") to lighten up the conspiratorial thinking prevalent elsewhere within this plot, and he sets the elegance of religion - the ritual, the buildings, the vestments - against the extremism of its most reactionary practitioners.

Only the thunderous score - by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso, and it often seems massimo capogrosso, punching up the tale's worst injustices for any thickos in the back - seems like a misjudgement, and then only in those places where it threatens to drown out the film's subtler dramatic accomplishments. The kaleidoscopic technique Bellocchio developed in Exterior, Night - devoting an episode to each of its characters, the better to give even fuller voice to individual viewpoints - becomes even more striking when applied to a single, 135-minute feature, allowing us to look long and deep into the souls of its characters. Right through to Kidnapped's closing image, what we see are schisms everywhere: between Poppa Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi), determined to plough on and even convert himself if it means bringing his boy back home, and a wife (Barbara Ronchi, another of Bellocchio's unforgettably mournful heroines) who sees only loss wherever she looks; between the grief-stricken family and the adaptable, suggestible boy. Pius (Paolo Pierobon, resembling Michael Stuhlbarg playing Gladiator's Commodus) is characterised by a midfilm bout of night terrors that involves Jewish intruders circumcising him as he lies stricken in bed. (As Bellocchio has realised, a lot of this story - and stories like it - is rooted in ignorance and insecurity.) Such is the close attention paid to physical and psychological detail - the places these people pass through, the thoughts passing through their head - we don't just walk a mile in these shoes, but start to feel the ground beneath: the yielding wood of the courtroom, the discomfiting brick of a cell, the nave's impassively cool marble. Raised to shoulder height by performers you've barely seen before, who carry no baggage yet look and sound intensely right for their roles, the result is something of a miracle: a story brought back to complete life, such that it casts sharp new light on the world's present woes. We're all praying to the same idea of a higher power, and for many of the same blessings. The question Bellocchio so eloquently and elegantly frames here is this: why do we then let others divide us so?

Kidnapped is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.