2023-10-31 20:00:11
As a child, Marco Bellocchio, the son of a large family and raised in all the rigor of the Catholic faith of post-war Italy, lived for a long time in terror of committing a mortal sin and going to hell. An anguish that pursued him for years. And if he very quickly moved away from religion, espousing the ideas of the revolutionary left of his time – the 1960s –, “these are feelings that have remained buried deep within me and regularly nourish my imagination”he concedes today.
He evoked it, in the mode of fierce score-settling, in one of his first films, In the name of the Father (1972), and used it in his last film Pick up to evoke the painful experience lived by little Edgardo. That of a 6-year-old boy snatched in 1858 from his Jewish family in Bologna, the Mortaras, by the pontifical police, on the grounds that he had been baptized in secret by his nanny and must, according to canon law, be educated in the religion Catholic.
Marco Bellocchio, director of the film “Esterno notte”, photographed at the Cannes Film Festival, at the Majestic Hotel on May 18, 2022. / Audoin Desforges/Pasco&co
The child, taken to Rome and placed in a “house of catechumens”, finds himself in the evening in one of these immense dormitories, deprived of his family and terrorized by the symbols of his new religion, including this omnipresent crucified Christ. A gesture of “extreme violence”underlines Marco Bellocchio, committed in the name of an intangible principle embodied by the We can not pronounced by Pope Pius IX when public opinion, in Italy as throughout Europe, invited him to return the child to his family.
The 83-year-old filmmaker nevertheless denies any ideological intention. “My film is not a manifesto against the Pope or the Church, what interested me above all was the human and family history, the intimate drama experienced by this child. The little story that fits into the big one. » That of the unification of Italy and the wavering of the temporal power of the Pope, also that of the end of the 19th century, when liberal and progressive ideas clashed with conservatism and tradition.
But as is often the case with Marco Bellocchio, behind the uncompromising political statement and the sumptuously staged historical reconstruction, it is the inner heartbreak of little Edgardo that interests him. “Discovering this story, I was struck by the mystery of this child who, when he had the opportunity to free himself, fifteen years later, and reunite with his family, decided to remain faithful to the Catholic religion and to the Pope. » Martyr of a cause that goes beyond him and of the impossibility of any compromise.
Just like Aldo Moro, prime minister kidnapped and assassinated by the Red Brigades in 1978, whose Christ-like figure permeates the series Exterior at nightwhich the director signed for Arte last year. “I wouldn’t say that this figure of the martyr obsesses me, but it interests me, explains the director. Edgardo and Aldo Moro are both prisoners but from very different realities. Aldo Moro had to be sacrificed because of his openness to the communists, which was not acceptable in the context of the Cold War. Edgardo saves his life but not his soul, he converts but loses the most important thing, his family, his parents. »
Childhood, family, religion, intimate tragedy are themes that permeate all of Marco Bellocchio’s work. And we cannot help but see in Pick up resonances between the Mortaras, this wealthy family of eight children, and that of Marco Bellocchio in Piacenza. “It is true that the situation of this wealthy family, whose children I show playing in this large house in a warm climate, resonates strongly with my personal experience, even if my family has experienced other tragedies”insists the director.
His was the suicide in 1968 at the age of 29 of his twin brother, Camillo. In 2021, he dedicated a very personal documentary to it, Marx can waitwhich is released in theaters in France at the same time as Pick up. It allows us to better understand the career of this atypical director and shed light on his entire filmography. “It was not my initial intention, he confides. But by wanting to delve deeper into this drama and by talking with my brothers, sisters and children, I put together a series of images that form a summary of everything I did. It is for me a very important film which says everything about my life and my work. »
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