The key points
- The child escapes from the Camorra
- A piano master hides it in his home
- Excellent acting of the protagonist Silvio Orlando
Carefully pulling back the window curtains so as not to be seen, Gabriele Santoro (Silvio Orlando) witnesses a quarrel in the courtyard of the ancient Delabrè palace, in which he lives in Naples. He hears an insistent shouting and shady figures looking for a boy who has vanished into thin air. Thus begins “The hidden child” by Roberto Andò, film Out of competition, which closes the 74th Venice Film Festival with a flourish.
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Gabriele is a pianist who teaches at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella and lives, by choice, in the popular district of Forcella as a foreign body, detached from its inhabitants, mostly criminals, uncultivated, dressed in bright and badly made clothes.
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In that neighborhood Gabriele shies away from the high bourgeois life that he could have led, with a heavy family of magistrates behind him and, at the same time, from his piano talent that could have paved the way for a brilliant career. In that apartment, which retains an aristocratic beauty among the others, filled with the vulgarity of easy money, he seems to want to stop the world, reciting verses of poems, escaping the effort of being in the limelight, the compromise of an existence decided by his census.
Gabriele has been hiding all his life and that is why, when Ciro, the boy who has challenged the Camorra with a criminal act, slips into his house, he lets the boy find refuge in his rooms, slipping into a dead end. He risks retaliation by the Camorra, from which not even the police, colluding with the system, will save him.
“You are a Protestant in the wrong place”, says his father Roberto Herlitzka, a retired magistrate, who now prefers the power of love to the law.