Benedetta

Somehow I feel that since Paul Verhoeven turned eighty, he now has no need to please anyone, and so he just went and made a completely self-indulgent new movie. I think that the end result is a total nunsploitation B-movie rather than an A-grade art movie. The director once again shows off his great ability to be provocative and his black sense of humor. I am still a huge fan and therefore probably going to watch anything he makes, however, I know that Benedetta is definitely not going to be a movie for everyone. [KVIFF 2021] (28/08/2021)

Benedetta has spent most of her life in a convent, but now besides God, she started to love Bartolomea... what initially appears as a drama about forbidden love, in Paul Verhoeven's direction turns into a provocative and unpredictable story that opens up a lot of interesting topics and cleverly manipulates with the audience, their expectations, and the way it processes what happens to the protagonists on the screen. Equally daring, cynical, clever, and entertaining as the director's greatest classics. (22/11/2021)

In an effort to track down the truth about the life of the lesbian nun Benedetta Carlini, Verhoeven employs the formula of historical biography to analyse the Church’s model of power, in which faith is only one of the means of survival and maintaining dominance. Until the end, the film does not give a clear answer as to whether the protagonist really communicates with saints and possesses mystical abilities, or whether she is merely capable of exploiting the fears of others. Due to the impossibility of a rational explanation of some of the events depicted in the film, both interpretations remain possible. As in Total Recall , there is not a clearly defined line between reality and illusions or dreams. In any case, the Dutch filmmaker approaches belief in the supernatural with cynical humour and a sense of the grotesque, both of which are apparent in the arrangement of the mise-en-scene, working with the aesthetics of contradiction and ambiguity, and in the composition of the shots. As a complex, ambivalent female character, Benedetta alternately elicits sympathy and repulsion. Though she promises her followers protection from the plague that is decimating the Italian population, she mainly pursues her own gratification. Salvation and redemption are only illusions. Unlike the unquestioningly listening, frightened and thus easily manipulated crowd, we see that it is not Jesus but rather the closed city gates that provide protection against the disease. No divine forces, just a lockdown. Besides her intelligence and charisma, what makes her a credible religious figure are the stigmata that she inflicts on herself with a shard of glass. Consequently, she can determine what God’s will is and cheerfully abuse the fact that each of the nuns interprets the language of God in her own way. For Verhoeven, religion is not a matter of inner conviction, but rather a culturally, geographically and historically defined phenomenon that serves momentary biological needs and the interests of power. Anything can be justified by God. A similar approach to the clergy is taken by other representatives of the Church, whose hypocrisy Benedetta points out through her own deeds as she retreats into the background in the second half of the film. After the arrival of the nuncio, she changes from a character who abused power in an ethically dubious way to a representative of the resistance against the system, using her own body and sexuality for emancipation. The struggle for dominance, which sets the dynamics of the narrative, is thus unpredictable and suspenseful until the final minutes of the film. Verhoeven typically is not judgmental, nor does he cheer for any side. With a sociological interest, he only studies from afar how easily – regardless of the period – faith can be transformed into an instrument of control and how much a person’s value and power depend on the given historical situation. 85% (21/12/2021)

Set in a 17th-century Italian convent against the backdrop of a plague epidemic, this erotic film about nuns is a rather uneven attempt to raise its B-movie foundation, drawing primarily on the tradition of Italian exploitation flicks with nuns (so-called “nunsploitation”), to the level of a top-tier festival film. Paul Verhoeven threw into it his trademarks and favorite obsessions including, for example, caustic irony, sadism and perversion, and feminism, in this case spiced up with a mocking critique of the Church as a hypocritical institution controlled by power interests and standing in the way of sexual freedom. We follow the story of a young nun, who is experiencing very vivid visions of manifestations of Christ and undergoing a lesbian awakening with a newly arrived novice, from her childhood in a series of sacrilegious escapades, whose true origins are shrouded in mystery (perhaps a divine miracle, maybe just an act with a profit-seeking objective) and are the driving force of the entire film. Through most of its runtime, the film veers between a low-brow black-humor farce about the abuse of believers’ gullibility (with flatulence, defecation, playful pornographic motifs and the figure of Jesus Christ in the role of protector, who fearlessly decapitates enemies and beasts) and an agonizing serious drama with classical music and naturalistic violence, dealing with a delirious woman prone to self-harm and the negative impacts of fanatical faith. The clash of these two tonally contradictory approaches is quite problematic and unsatisfying, but perhaps that doesn’t matter to Verhoeven, as he probably just wanted to have a good romp and be a bit provocative and outrageous, which he succeeded in doing. Because of that, Benedetta falls into the category of borderline guilty-pleasure entertainment suitable for midnight festival screenings that will divide audiences, and in which the acting highlight is not the performances of the actresses portraying the lesbian couple, but that of Charlotte Rampling in the supporting (though essential and noteworthy) role of the sceptical mother superior. (03/09/2021)

Judging by the reviews and comments, Verhoeven has a specific charm through which he can surprise the viewer with every film he makes by how he deconstructs something, even though he's basically been doing nothing else his whole life. Whatever he touches – genre, society, period, zeitgeist, character studies, or the subject matter – he dissects down to the flesh, laughs nihilistically, drops the mic, and heads off for some other revision. Benedetta is an interesting blend of his earlier Flesh+Blood, (an exploitation of a medieval era full of filthy bandits, plagues, degenerate church representatives, and naked harlots) Showgirls/Keetje Tippel (an ambitious woman uses her body to rise on the backs of others in an emeritus, ossified world) and Basic Instinct (ambivalence and uncertainty about where the truth lies and whether it should be sought out is maintained until the very end). And I was intrigued by the extent to which it treats the theme of religious ecstasy as an erotic experience in a similar way to Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. Verhoeven's last two films under French productions have been marked by clearly the best scripts he's ever had, but unfortunately also the ugliest direction. Benedetta often looks like footage from a musical, looking terribly staged and artificial. It's funny, then, that the erotic passages work best in this framework, as they're reminiscent of the usual porn videos you have open on the next tab. (09/03/2022)