NYFF 2021 Film Review: Benedetta
Paul Verhoeven is in his element with the biting, provocative Benedetta
Long-delayed and eagerly anticipated, Paul Verhoeven’s incisive take on “nunsploitation” is finally here. There will be many to point out Benedetta’s racy sex scenes and its high lesbian camp, but the film is so much more than that. A provocative clapback against Puritanism, Catholic hypocrisy, and the shackles we place upon women’s bodies, Benedetta once again proves Verhoeven’s directorial mettle as cinema’s resident satirist. Minor spoilers ahead…
For the past half-century, Paul Verhoeven has been a special kind of provocateur. Some will view the impish filmmaker as a merchant of perpetual sleaze and ultra-violence, but his controversial oeuvre has always had more on its mind than transgressive pokes and prods. Often peering through radical genre lenses, Verhoeven’s works are frequently misunderstood: Robocop hides a scathing takedown of the American way through cyborg pulp, and Starship Troopers…well, you’d be hard-pressed to find many in 1997 that fully grasped its parody of fascist jingoism via sci-fi bug hunt. The director’s latest, Benedetta, is perhaps his most overt satire yet: Wearing its barbs on its sleeve, the film - extrapolated from Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life Of A Lesbian Nun In Renaissance Italy - sets its sights on the hypocritical patriarchy of organized religion and the imprisonment of women’s bodies, delivering one of the most incisive - and uproarious - movies of the year.
“Your body is your enemy, best not to feel at home in it.” That is one of the very first lessons imparted upon young Benedetta (Elena Plonka) as she’s sold into her convent’s religious servitude by her father. Growing up under the rule of the stern abbess Sister Felicita (a powerfully complex and dryly funny Charlotte Rampling), Benedetta (now played by Virginie Efira) lives under a pious wimple, prone to visions of a telenovela Jesus - a genital-less Ken doll that acts as prophet, savior, and occasional seducer that rides to her rescue and cleaves CGI snakes in twain. Claiming ever since childhood to be a conduit to a higher power, Benedetta’s visions - as well as the temptations of the flesh - intensify when the convent takes in the battered Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), a ribald young woman fleeing from her abusive father. Their connection evolves into an illicit affair, and as more of the order start believing in Benedetta’s miracles, she eventually challenges a bitterly skeptical Felicita for the role of Mother Superior.
“[Paul] Verhoeven, whose recent career leg has almost exclusively focused upon portraits of complicated women, knows exactly what he’s doing: [Virginie] Efira is excellent.”
Composed, layered, and poised, Virginie Efira at first seems like an odd choice for the role of Benedetta, on paper a libidinous ascendant in lockstep with Basic Instinct’s Catherine Trammell or Showgirls’ Nomi Malone. But Verhoeven, whose recent career leg has almost exclusively focused upon portraits of complicated women, knows exactly what he’s doing: Efira is excellent. Playing a camp role without relishing too much in camp, Efira’s surprising equanimity brews an intoxicating cocktail of Verhoeven’s greatest hits, mixing Elizabeth Berkeley’s fake-it-till-you-make-it gumption with Sharon Stone’s dangerous blonde ambition. Benedetta - like Basic Instinct before it - wisely keeps ambiguity alive to keep Efira formidable: Are her miracles real or are they manufactured? It’s up to us to parse the delusion, zeal, and ambition from within Benedetta’s actions.
Benedetta has long been pigeonholed as “that lesbian nun movie,” and somewhat unfairly. Of course, Verhoeven is as lurid and irreverent as ever - the film opens with a man lighting his farts ablaze, and there are quite a few things that can be said about the film’s totem of a whittled Virgin Mary dildo - but there’s much more to the film than mere provocation. Sure, there is an abundance of sex scenes that border upon high camp sacrilege, but Benedetta also functions as a cauldron of tones - it’s deadly precise about what it wants to say, and there’s a lot it wants to say. Most obviously, the film draws parallels with Ken Russell’s The Devils, itself a controversial mixture of violence, sexuality, and religion that also served as condemnation of the institutions of faith. Verhoeven’s vision bristles just as sharply against Catholic hypocrisy, its blasphemous blurring of religious epiphany and carnal desire flying in the face of Sister Felicita’s words: “No miracle ever occurs in a bed, believe me.”
“Of course, Verhoeven is as lurid and irreverent as ever…but there’s much more to the film than mere provocation.”
Benedetta is also much, much funnier than you would expect. In a world where men sell their daughters like chattel and crush women under the boot-heel of Catholic faith, Verhoeven uses biting wit and farce to skewer. “A convent is not a place of charity,” sneers Sister Felicita, who rakes in the cash for each new novitiate at the convent. And once Rampling’s head nun is driven out by Benedetta’s power plays, in march the men through a whirlwind of palace politics: summoned by an accusatory Felicita, the local Papal Nuncio (a bombastic Lambert Wilson) enters to conduct his own due diligence on Benedetta’s miracles. As disgusting as he is corrupt, Wilson’s terrifying adjudication quickly devolves into a dark comedy of errors, as the film commingles its denouement with the Black Death. Yes, Benedetta is a stealth pandemic movie, pustules and all.
Here, Verhoeven is perhaps at his least subtle, but its Efira’s Benedetta who is nigh impenetrable: the character has the 44 year-old thespian’s full conviction, and she never lets us on to her motives. Swept up in the winds of rebellion, she’s as convincing in the midst of her stigmata as she is in the throes of sapphic pleasure. Benedetta is a mishmash of ideas, tones, and performances that shouldn’t really work, but it’s also a willful, outrageous paradox that only Verhoeven can pull off. As our entertainment becomes more homogenized and Puritanical, the more precious films like Benedetta become; they’re not only art, but deliverance.
