“Benedetta” by Paul Verhoeven in the cinema: The unchaste – culture

Benedetta’s adventure begins with heavenly bird shit. The girl is in the carriage with her parents when she asks to stop to be allowed to pray near a statue of the Virgin Mary. During the rest, the family is wiped out by robbers, but Benedetta threatens them: “The Blessed Virgin Mary does everything I want.” The then sends the desired signal, in the form of a shitting bird, which empties itself on the head of one of the attackers. As a precaution, the robbers leave.

The carriage brings Benedetta to Pescia, to a convent of the Theatine women, which she will enter. The further story of the young woman is then doubly interesting. For one, she begins the classic career of a saint who begins to have visions of Jesus occasionally speaking to others through her mouth while stigmata appear on her hands. On the other hand, years later, when she is already a young woman and is played by Virginie Efira, she will start a relationship with a novice, Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia), who finds refuge in the monastery on the run from her abusive father.

A lesbian saint in Italy in the 17th century: a subject made for Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch master of eroticism, satire and the highly ironic spectacle. In view of the lustful sex scenes between the two nuns, one could add “provocation”, but the label is used overly inflationary, even if it might apply to the director of “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls”. In fact, Verhoeven made a humorous film about flesh and faith with “Benedetta”, which was finished two years ago but could only be shown in Cannes this year because of Corona.

“Miracles spring up like mushrooms,” says the abbess

The director himself once wrote a book about Jesus together with Rob van Scheers (“Jesus: The Story of a Man”). For the new film, he was also inspired by the study “Immodest Acts. The Life of a Lesbian Now in Renaissance Italy”, in which the historian Judith C. Brown reconstructs the life of the historical Benedetta Carlini. Brown examines files found in Florentine archives of the inquisition process that the church then brought against the nun. The charge was heresy and the “unchaste acts” between two women were exposed at the same time.

For Verhoeven, the “sacred”, the divine, the heavenly, to which Benedetta feels so close, is deeply defiled from the start. It mixes with the physical and organic, with digestive processes and excrement. Hence the scatological impact in the film, in which the Virgin Mary makes herself noticeable through bird droppings and Bartolomea, after her arrival at the monastery, lets Benedetta take her to the shit house to relieve her bowels.

The next level of pollution is economic: Admission to the monastery costs money. The Mother Superior, played by a grandiose Charlotte Rampling, warns Benedetta’s father that he should “just not haggle like a Jew”, while she remains extremely sober about the miracles allegedly performed by Benedetta: “Miracles sprout like mushrooms . ” The cynicism of the clergy is also evident in the fact that a canonization of Benedetta is primarily expected to be a successful PR campaign that is supposed to bring crowds of pilgrims and buyers of devotional objects to Pescia.

Verhoeven’s pleasure in the impure is most evident in the mixing of the sacred with the erotic. In Benedetta’s Jesus visions, the Savior rescues her from male attackers and snakes, while he also wants to seduce her and in doing so takes on the features of Bartolomea – especially in a grandiose scene in which Benedetta approaches him on the cross and enters under his aired robe female genital becomes visible. From the beginning, Benedetta’s love for Jesus and the Mother of God is mixed up with a fixation on the female breast, which a statue of Mary that falls on her and miraculously stands over her seems to offer her. And later Bartolomea makes a dildo out of the statue of Mary for her love games, which Benedetta brought to the monastery as a girl.

Benedetta by no means gives the impression that she doubts her sacred destiny; she even promises to save Pescia from the plague that is knocking on the city’s gates (the film, in this regard, comes in time for the fourth wave of corona). At the same time, her “vocation” has a political and strategic component: thanks to her promotion to abbess, she has a private room in which she and Bartolomea can retreat undisturbed. So is she simulating or is she really obsessed? Are their stigmata real or self-imposed? Are the visions divine inspirations or imaginations?

The great strength of Verhoeven’s film lies in keeping both options open without making a decision or looking down cynically on its characters. The Inquisition’s desire to know everything exactly ends in cruel physical torture. On the other hand, Verhoeven insists on the almost religious need to believe and trust what you see on screen, however ambiguous it may be. Because you can only believe in what you can also doubt, and doubt has a central function at Verhoeven: It keeps the audience interested in fictions, false floors and intricate truths.

Benedetta, F, BE, NL 2021 – Director: Paul Verhoeven. Book: Verhoeven, David Birke, Judith C. Brown. Camera: Jeanne Lapoirie. With Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson. Capelight / Kochfilms / Central, 131 minutes. Theatrical release: December 2nd, 2021