‘Benedetta’
You could say director Paul Verhoeven specializes in the field of blasphemy, at least in the global sense. The venerable director, now 83, has made a career of being provocative, sometimes with luminous sex (“Basic Instinct”), sometimes with unrestrained violence and gore (“Starship Troopers”), sometimes with uncomfortable subject matter (“Black Book,” “Elle”), sometimes with campy, questionable taste (“Hollow Man”), or often, some combination of all of the above (“Showgirls”).
What he has never done is apologize for his work, or shy away from its controversial elements. “Benedetta,” which shot out of Cannes like a blasphemic bullet train, finds the Dutch filmmaker working from historic source material (“Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy”) to produce a film that will drive some people to distraction, just as he seems to prefer.
Blasphemy, as a term, refers to acting in a sacrilegious manner — which, as you can imagine, invites a pretty broad scope of possibility — and is, therefore, more or less in the eye of the beholder, a sort of “I know it when I see it,” type of thing, dependent upon which religion you adhere to.
Still, short of straight, chaotic Satanism, carving a statue of the Blessed Virgin into a device of sexual gratification would likely fit the definition by most accounts. And that’s only one of the carnal sins Mother Superior Benedetta (Virginie Efira) becomes accused of by Sister Felicita (Charlotte Rampling), the former head of Benedetta’s convent, and Alfonso Giglioti (Lambert Wilson), the acting Nuncio of the church.
Set in the 17th century, in plague-stricken Italy, Benedetta is brought to the convent in Pescia, a small city west of Florence, as a young girl, by her well-to-do parents. Young as she may be, she already seems to have a direct line of communication with Jesus — experiencing visions of him claiming her as his bride as he protects her from various manifestations of evil. Grown up into a proper and obliging sister in the order, she takes on a young vagabond named Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), who flees to the church as a means of escaping her lecherous father, as a protege.
It’s not long before Bartolomea, with, perhaps a different understanding of religious boundaries, becomes amorous of her mentor, and the two consummate their carnal interest after Benedetta experiences stigmata — the bleeding of her hands and her feet, as Christ at the cross — and is named Reverend Mother by a believing Bishop (Olivier Rabourdin), displacing the well-established Sister Felicita in the process.
When the scorned Felicita, who spies on the two women as they lie in her former chambers, makes her way to Florence to make formal charges against them to the Nuncio, she sets in motion a catastrophic series of events that result in a city’s tumult and torture, leaving a string of bodies in the wake.
Despite its considerable sexual content, and classic porn-style storyline, Verhoeven’s film is hardly a titillating skinshow. Or, at least, it doesn’t stop there. In an early scene set in the convent privy, on Bartolomea’s first night, the two women sit next to each other, evacuating their digestive tracts; the Jesus in Benedetta’s visions strikes down evil doers with bloody sword slashes and decapitations worthy of a video game; another sister suffers with a gruesome (likely cancerous) lesion on her breast. The film is concerned with the carnal, to a certain degree, but more precisely, it’s somatic in general, presenting the human body and its functions as Godly as the delicate Vespers the nuns sing each evening.
Verhoeven is an artist, but has never been particularly precious. He generally employs a sort of smash-mouth style, much more concerned with plot drive and spectacle than subtle storytelling or particularly noteworthy scene construction. In a film festooned with religious imagery, his no-nonsense style works to keep things grounded, even as Benedetta’s Jesus provocations take on a more luminescent sheen (notably, toward the end of the film, we are no longer privy to Benedetta’s visions at all — allowing the viewer to wonder about the validity of her reportage).
The director also cannily begins to question his protagonist’s version of events — repeatedly, she is shown using shards of glass to instigate her stigmatic palms — bringing to question whether she entirely believes her own version of events or is playing a long game in the face of the rampant cynicism of the Church, who wants to designate her as a religious icon to make Prescia as famous (and flush) as Assisi, after Francis made it a Catholic destination.
Not everything quite works, the ending, in particular, feels as if it’s trying to do too many things at once, and too quickly, but Verhoeven doesn’t seem particularly worried about such niceties. By the end, I suspect the audience members who remain in their seats (needless to say, this isn’t a wholesome film for the family this holiday season) will already have consumed a heaping full plate from the unapologetic director’s banquet of unquiet to contemplate.