NYFF: Sisters are doing it for themselves in Paul Verhoeven's blaspheme-licious "Benedetta"
Saturday, September 25, 2021 at 8:40PM by Jason Adams
Never let it be said that writer, director, and everlasting gob-dropping provocateur Paul Verhoeven doesn't know how to entertain. In what other director's hands would a dramatic film about a 17th century Tuscan nun having visions and tackling both the patriarchy and the plague involve a Virgin Mary statue whittled down for her pleasure? (Okay definitely Almodovar too). But Benedetta, Verhoeven's latest outrageous act of delicious cinematic provocation, is nevertheless All Paul, from the hem of its habit to the tip of its nips. And that's just the poster! Just wait until you peel that part down and see what sexy bits are bouncing about underneath...
Adapting Judith C. Brown's academically researched 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, which uncovered and detailed the forgotten true life and spectacular downfall of Sister Benedetta Carlini in Pescia Italy during the Catholic Reformation period of the early 17th century, Verhoeven juices up every possible moment via his rascally irrepressible showmanship genes. Why, for instance, wouldn't Benedetta (a spectacularly game Virginie Efira) not have her meet-cute with her lesbian lover-to-be Sister Bartolomea (the lasciviously puppy-eyed Daphne Patakia, game for even more) play out as they pass gas and water on a side-by-side set of privies? Why not, why not twice, why not twenty times? If you have to ask "why" you're at the wrong movie.
Benedetta's been having visions of her own personal Jesus since childhood, when her parents shipped her off to the local convent. Riding past Renaissance actors dressed as skeletons play-acting out fiery fart gags, we watch a roving gang-member get bird shit in his eye for even questioning the little girl's god-on-speed-dial situation within the film's first five minutes, letting us know that one, Benedetta's got some sort of gift it seems, even if it's just for ginning up a good scene and angling it to her benefit. And two, that Paul Verhoeven is going to tell us all about this in the most outrageously goofy and good-time way possible. Even when the torture instruments come out and the plague pustules start a'poppin' you can be sure that Verhoeven -- who let's not forget wrote a scholarly book about the life of Jesus himself! -- is never going to be too depressive about it. There's no dryness to his humours -- his liquidic temperament squishes and squeals with a more let's say choleric nature.
And Benedetta's more than happy to lap up every drop of it. Efira, who worked with Verhoeven previously on Elle (she was the Jesus Freak Next Door married to Huppert's rapist) and who gave one of 2019's great performances in Sybil, relishes dipping into every contradictory corner of this character, a bottomless well of needs and wants that are constantly outrunning her understanding of them. To Benedetta religion is nothing but infinite possibility -- if she can dream it, she can be it. And all of her subconscious desires, her subtext, gets scribbled in big curlicue gold-leafed font for all to see as soon as her wily ways figure out how best to argue their case. She's pounding out her own version of the Bible, one chapter at a time, Jesus' wife on a messianic rampage -- nothing is wrong if you believe the voices in your head hard enough. Or you can get the other people in the room too, anyway.
Benedetta, for all of its big "Horny Nun!" headlines, is really about that gap right there between belief and truth, and how religion's exploited it since inception. It's about who gets to say what is and what isn't; how things "are" and how they "are not." About whose stories get passed down generation after generation and whose get buried in church archives for centuries until culture's caught up and can maybe find some way in which to tell them. Jesus and his homies have been hogging the spotlight for two full millennia now -- Paul Verhoeven's grand-high-time Benedetta is here to push them off the mic for a hot sec and let us in on a whole other path to enlightenment, and other such sticky ecstatic notions.
Benedetta, Charlotte Rampling, NYFF, Paul Verhoeven, Virginie Efira
Reader Comments (3)
Man, this looks tawdry, insane, and just downright obscene but that's the Verhoeven that I know and love.
Man, this looks tawdry, insane, and just downright obscene but that's the Verhoeven that I know and love.
I also loved this Jason. Yay. I'm so glad Verhoeven is still making movies. That filmography is so crazy in its evolution and I love that it is so international too with French, Dutch, and English movies.