Confortorio

‘Every death has to be comforted; every soul has to be saved. We snatched from the Evil One even the dirtiest scum: parricides, rogues, misbelievers, Lutherans, hardened assassins, prostitutes.’ ‘But they were not Jews!’ This poignant exchange of lines aptly summarizes the content of Benvenuti’s second feature, Confortorio (from the name of the institution attending to the religious comfort of those sentenced to death).
Based on historical records dating from the Rome of the Popes, Confortorio retains the qualities of a classic tragedy: unity of space, time and action. It chronicles an endless night in 1736, when high prelates from various confraternities (Dominicans, Capuchins, Jesuits) pertinaciously tried, but eventually failed, to convert to Christianity two Jewish thieves who had been sentenced to death. The first execution of Jews in Rome in 120 years, in fact, posed a huge moral challenge to the whole Vatican hierarchy: ‘If you kill a Jew’s body, you murder the man, and you are guilty of not respecting the commandment’, says the head of the Capuchins. The gripping drama of two poor fellows who find dignity and even greatness in their stubborn will to die ‘in their God’ is magnified by Benvenuti’s cinematic canvas, where the dramatic effects of chiaroscuro replicate the style of late Caravagesques.

• 

• 

•