The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “The Boy and the Heron” by Hayao Miyazaki and “The Kidnapping” by Marco Bellocchio.
The Boy and the Heron is Hayao Miyazaki’s twelfth feature film, both the most autobiographical and a sort of best of of his work and his favorite themes.
Mahito is a young 11-year-old boy who lives in Tokyo at the end of the Second World War, and who must leave the capital for the Japanese countryside after the accidental death of his mother in a fire. His new playground: a huge, somewhat sad mansion, a huge piece of land near a river, and a lot of solitude, his father also deciding to remarry, and to expect a baby with his deceased’s younger sister. female.
Mahito will meet a talking gray heron, with an unattractive human face hidden in its beak, and discover many things. The Boy and the Heron is a masterpiece, and the most ‘Lewiscarollian’ of its author.
He therefore summons childhood, mourning, the marvelous, the future of the planet, historical references, war, creating a sort of old-fashioned, and very personal, often flamboyant multiverse – with animals too. splendid as well as menacing – sometimes complex, slightly ironic, and always magnificent.
Pick up by Marco Bellocchio
Since 1965, Marco Bellocchio has recounted the turbulent history of his country in his films, and never misses an opportunity to denounce the weight of the Catholic Church in Italy.
In Pick up, it relates a historical fact as little known as it is astonishing. In 1853, Pope Pius IX had a 7-year-old child kidnapped from a Jewish family in Bologna because he had been baptized, without his parents’ knowledge, by a former servant. The young Edgardo Mortara was sent to Rome, where he received a strict Catholic education, which he made his own, forgetting his Jewish roots, to the great despair of his family, who never stopped trying to free him from the clutches of the Vatican.
For two hours, we follow this drama like a religious thriller with multiple issues. It is remarkably filmed, as always with Bellocchio, master of a classicism that is never dusty, who still knows how to innovate, particularly in the last scenes, when the Garibaldian revolution reduces the influence of the Vatican to its Roman territory alone.
Seen in Cannes, where Marco Bellocchio was once again ignored by the jury, Pick up recalls the recurring anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church, and is released in theaters, at a time when religious fanaticism is sadly making headlines.