Lesbian nun drama Benedetta is both profane and sublime—no wonder some Catholics hate it
Paul Verhoeven's controversial new film is as lurid but more spiritual than you've heard
Film Reviews Benedetta
Although church membership in the United States is at an all-time low—especially among Catholics—playing fast and loose with Christianity still has the power to shock a pious few. Take the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, which has condemned Benedetta as “pornographic filth” and “blasphemy against our spiritual Mother, the Holy Catholic Church.” The group has turned out small groups of protestors to early screenings of the film, clutching banners and lobbing Hail Marys at the heathens queued up outside the theater. Playing their role in this modern-day religious pageant, the heretics laugh and take selfies.
All of this must be terribly amusing to director Paul Verhoeven, whose last film, 2016’s Elle, was the kind of challenging arthouse fare that would seem to point toward a more cerebral phase of his career. Benedetta is both that Verhoeven and the Verhoeven who made Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Verhoeven co-wrote the script with Elle’s David Birke, using the book Immodest Acts: The Life Of A Lesbian Nun In Renaissance Italy as the jumping-off point for their own impish interpretation of the life of Benedetta Carlini, the abbess of a convent in 17th-century Italy who was prosecuted and imprisoned for an affair with one of her fellow brides of Christ.
But frottage—a.k.a. scissoring, which the historical record mentions specifically, and Verhoeven re-creates faithfully—was not Benedetta’s only affront to Renaissance decency. The film rides a provocative line by never quite clarifying whether Benedetta’s lifelong conviction that she’s been chosen by Jesus and the Virgin Mary is a real anointment by God, a fanatical delusion, or a cynical power play. For her part, Belgian movie star Virginie Efira plays the title character with complete conviction, whether she’s kneeling in awe before the Virgin Mary or being pleasured with a dildo carved out of a statue of the Blessed Mother.
A comedic prologue sets the tone with a sharp-tongued child and a conveniently timed splatter of bird shit, but the story really begins when a new initiate, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), arrives at the walled convent where Benedetta lives. A victim of abuse and incest, Bartolomea has no frame of reference for how to thank someone for being kind to her except to offer that person sexual gratification. And so, when Benedetta defends her and takes her under her wing, Bartolomea responds the only way she knows how.
But the sparks between the two women don’t test Benedetta’s faith. If anything, the relationship enhances her powers as a mystic, inspiring vivid dreams containing profound messages from God. The appearance of the stigmata on her hands and feet convince the majority of the nuns that this young sister is the real deal, and soon Benedetta has replaced the convent’s longtime abbess, Sister Felicita (Charlotte Rampling), as its leader.
Ecstatic visions, erotically charged regimes of punishment and penitence, and backroom Catholic politics ensue. There are those at the Theatine Convent of the Mother of God who think Benedetta is a sham. And given her confidence and charisma, it doesn’t take much for church officials like the corrupt Nuncio of Florence (Lambert Wilson) to sign on to this theory. So, who speaks for God? Benedetta? Sister Felicita? Nuncio, and the sadistic smile that creeps across his face when he puts poor Bartolomea to the rack?
The obvious touchstone for Benedetta is The Devils, Ken Russell’s still semi-blacklisted 1971 movie. These films tread similar ground in terms of themes and content: Both use historical events as inspiration for a furious condemnation of institutional hypocrisy, and both delight in the blasphemous commingling of religious and carnal ecstasy. (Both also have a scene of a nun kissing a bloodied, emaciated Christ on the cross—enough, on its own, to send legions of decency types into hysterics.) But Benedetta is a more earnest film in the sense that, at times, it plays like a glowing, pious Catholic drama about the lives of the saints—but with scenes from a ’70s nunsploitation movie cut in.
Verhoeven embraces the coarse earthiness of Renaissance peasant culture in Benedetta. Shortly after the bird-shit gag, a carriage taking young Benedetta to her new home at the convent passes a stage show where actors in skeleton costumes light their farts for a cheering crowd. Plague lingers in the background, a memento mori that brings a sense of urgency to the passions that drive the story. As in his WWII drama Black Book, Verhoeven applying his pulpier tendencies to historical drama in Benedetta plays like a defiant assertion of life—lusty, messy, wanton, animal life—in the face of overwhelming death and oppression.
This affirmation stirs the blood, to be sure. But it’s also the key to why those protestors are so upset. Mortification of the flesh is a key tenet of Christianity, declaring that one must deny one’s earthly needs and desires as much as possible in order to be worthy of God. Benedetta, a story about a nun who has both a close relationship with Jesus Christ and an active sex life, obviously contradicts this. More importantly, in the Catholic Church specifically, priests are necessary middle men who stand between the faithful and the divine. Benedetta doesn’t need men to talk to God for her, which, along with her brazen ambition, makes her an existential threat.
If Benedetta is a true saint—and this movie leaves that question open to interpretation—then queer sex is holy, and church hierarchy is parasitic and unnecessary. This, even more so than the Virgin Mary dildo, is what makes Benedetta dangerous. Although the Virgin Mary dildo doesn’t hurt.
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Although the Virgin Mary dildo doesn’t hurt.Depends where you put it.
Hi-yoooo!!!
You’ve taken a Vow of Comedy!!!
Heavens to Betsy, I’ve invented a praying machine!!
You may get blood, or a whine.
Dammit, take your star and get out.
What, like the back seat of a Volkswagen?
No, no, no! The clit is REAL! It’s female orgasm that’s the myth!
That’s why God invented lube.
I put mine back on the wall at Church. It didn’t ‘go down’ well …
Homina homina homina!
Paul Verhoeven, whose last film, 2016’s Elle, was the kind of challenging arthouse fare that would seem to point toward a more cerebral phase of his career. Benedetta is both that Verhoeven and the Verhoeven who made Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Excuse you?! Showgirls was a goddamned work of art and I will hear no dissent to this.Would you like to know more? [YES]
the mistake americans tend to make regarding verhoeven is that they think movies are about “dollars boxoffice” and he thinks movies are something he does so that he wont have to get a real job, pissing people off is just a bonus, and yet very smart commercially.
I would argue that Black Book, not Elle, was the beginning on Verhoeven’s ostensible “cerebral phase.” The Dutch certainly thought so. In any case, I think we can all agree that we’re grading “cerebral” on a sliding scale here.
Yeah I think “relatively cerebral” would be a more accurate descriptor.
I was going down an internet hole last year reading up on Verhoeven’s career, and I remember laughing out loud from this line on the Wikipedia page for Flesh and Blood, his first English language movie:
“The film’s financial failure caused Verhoeven to move to the United States in September 1985 in order to better understand American culture and what films would be suited to its audience.”Only Verhoeven could make a film where the person you think you’re supposed to root for rapes the main female character halfway through, and then wonder why Americans didn’t like the movie.
If you’re interested, here’s a series of video essays that compare and contrast the book and the novel versions of Starship Troopers and the perspectives of Heinlien and Verhooven’s careers.
The odd thing about calling Heinlein’s book* “fascist” is that it’s so radically globalist, and rather explicitly indicates a universalist conception of morality which would extend across species awaiting in the future. And after wasting an absurd amount of time watching that series of videos I now have to wonder if he read the part where it’s discussed how they’re trying to capture “brain bugs” to begin communicating about POWs, rather than just trying to nuke all the bugs from orbit (which is what would be done if the objective was genocide, and which would render the MI unnecessary as the Navy could handle everything).*Which I reviewed here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/starship-troopers/It was particularly funny when he said the phrase “Deep State” is all American, after earlier going on about how his time abroad gave him a broader perspective than provincial Americans. Too bad he never lived in Turkey.
The one thing he was definitely right about is that he’s just an idiot on the internet who talks about movies. It’s unfortunate he feels the need to talk about all those other things he knows so little about.
Shut up, Laserface.
Only Verhoeven could make a film where the person you think you’re
supposed to root for rapes the main female character halfway through,
and then wonder why Americans didn’t like the movie.
DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT IS WHY PEOPLE DID NOT LIKE IT? THIS IS AMERICA IN 1985 YOUR ARE TALKING ABOUT.
I’ve watched plenty of Verhoeven, but when that scene came on, I thought, surely something’s going to stop this. But, nope.
But, point taken. Maybe he just shouldn’t have made 1500s Italy look so damn dirty.
I was alive in the 80s, and pretty sure rape was frowned upon even in those dark ages of American history.
Well then he musta been pissed when he saw Revenge of the Nerds.
And after all that time he came to the conclusion it’s okay if Kevin Bacon does it while he’s invisible.
I watched a lesbian nun movie and went down a few holes!
Holy Double Holy Entendre, Batman!
To be fair, they liked it ok when it was called Gone With the Wind.
not sure if you picked the right character that you were “supposed to root for, remembering what i do of the film it had little to with that, in fact it was more an essay on how cheap lives were in that age and how easy people, men and women were discarded. In fact some “rooted” for rutger hauers character (i kid you not) because him raping her and her “embracing” it destroyed both her nobility and his male power, personly i thought it just was crap
Rutger Hauer’s character, a working class mercenary, does get screwed over by his aristocratic patron, even after he has filled his end of the bargain and retaken his castle, if I remember correctly. So it looks like the movie is going to allow us to root for Hauer as he gets revenge on the pompous jerk who betrayed him.But Verhoeven throws a rape in there to fuck up our allegiances. The only character you can really sympathize with is Jennifer Jason Leigh’s, and she’s held captive and brutalized through most of the film.
As my college roommate used to put it, it is a critical film in Jennifer Jason Leigh’s “Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Character Gets Raped in the Film” film period.
i think verhoeven is master of making characters grey, but leigh actually (and controversially ) gets raped and takes over as a power move, to be honest its not realistic nor adviceable but it’s an attempt to make her more that the victim
I never discard easy people!
I shut it off at that point
I was going down an internet hole last year reading up on Verhoeven’s career
Funny enough a lot of Verhoeven’s career also involves going down holes.
where the person you think you’re supposed to root for rapes the main
female character halfway through, and then wonder why Americans didn’t
like the movie. Yeah, I don’t think that was it. I actually like the film just for how extreme Verhoeven-esque it is, but the reason it did poorly is more likely because no one in that film is a good person or anyone you can really root for. EVERYONE in that film is a total asshole. Rutger Howard’s character is a rapist and does horrible things all the time. His band of outlaws, both male and female, are every bit as bad. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character seems to enjoy the abuse yet happy to help his band die. She is also willing to stay with whichever love interest kills the other. The knight who takes in the nun after giving her brain damage is a hateful bastard. There is no one to root for, at all. Lots of nudity though.
I agree with this completely. Flesh & Blood was morally all over the place and this didn’t stick with the comforting Hollywood-movie formula of the era, where the hero can be as vicious and thuggish as he wants as long as he’s acting for ‘good’. (see Rambo) It was quite a disturbing watch, which I really appreciated at the time.
Were we supposed to “root for” Hauer’s character?!
Most of Verhoeven’s movies are very watchable, except for Showgirls, which was utter crap.
So this basically the closest thing we’ll ever get to a remake of The Devils.
“The obvious touchstone for Benedetta is The Devils, Ken Russell’s still semi-blacklisted 1971 movie. These films tread similar ground in terms of themes and content: Both use historical events as inspiration for a furious condemnation of institutional hypocrisy, and both delight in the blasphemous commingling of religious and carnal ecstasy. (Both also have a scene of a nun kissing a bloodied, emaciated Christ on the cross—enough, on its own, to send legions of decency types into hysterics.) But Benedetta is a more earnest film in the sense that, at times, it plays like a glowing, pious Catholic drama about the lives of the saints—but with scenes from a ’70s nunsploitation movie cut in.”
I got confused in a Paris McDonald’s and asked for frottage on my burger. Shoulda seen the looks I got.
Royale with cheese du frottage.
Look, in Paris it doesn’t matter what you ask for; somebody is putting their genitals on your food!
There’s a joke in there about a Beef ‘n Cheddar.
Le NOM!
That usually takes an additional 3-5 minutes to prepare.
Pfft, 3-5? Amateur.
I assume that because it was in France, the looks were of hearty approval.
Appreciative?
Well, rock me Sexy Jesus!
It’s my totally uninformed opinion that sex and sexiness in mainstream movies, done responsibly, is a good thing, and it’s a shame that a large percentage of movies now are pretty sexless. I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that’s happened as internet porn has dominated the landscape.
its almost like in the real world people have sex, sometimes tender, sometimes wild, and hey lets be honest we do have a rape problem, but showing all that in movies is really the problem
What movies are you watching? There’s still lots of sex in lots of movies
Better question: What movies are you watching?
Best Director of sex scenes: Spike Lee.
…the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property…Welp, thanks for being honest, you capitalist pigs.
They’re an off-shoot of a South American anti-communist group.
Which means there are probably some legit origins for their bullshit. Thanks for context.
For those who were not raised in The Church, Hail Marys are not footballs.
I liked this movie more the first time when it was called “Satan’s Alley.”Yes, you know the one: Winner of the Beijing Film Festival’s coveted Crying Monkey Award.
You can just give me any old monkey; I’ll make it cry.
OK, little girl.
So the Pope let us off with a stern warning; but you know, that was the last time we let Sister Benedetta direct the Christmas pageant.
Immodest Acts is a really good book.
Immodest Acts (of The Apostles)?
This film isn’t very realistic. The real Catholic Church has WAY more gay sex.
They gotta save something for Benedetta II: Bene-dover For Father Bailey!
“The film rides a provocative line by never quite clarifying whether Benedetta’s lifelong conviction that she’s been chosen by Jesus and the Virgin Mary is a real anointment by God, a fanatical delusion, or a cynical power play.”No offense, but this “line” has been drawn, re-drawn, copied, stenciled, etc. since Paul took over the game.No need to call it “provocative” anymore.
Yeah, that’s why Catholicism famously embraces ambiguity, rather than cleaving to spiritual and earthly hierarchies. Lord knows Catholics have proven themselves highly resistant to provocation over the last few decades.
Madonna already took all the air out of the whole sex/God thing in the 80s
A welcome addition new addition to the nunsploitation subgenre
You think they’ll ever realise complaining about things like this will basically end up causing the Streisand Effect? Somehow I doubt it.
I was waiting for this. Just such a shame Graham Linehan turned out to be a transphobic cunt.
If it makes you feel better , he was only half the ‘Ted team . Arthur Matthews (his writing partner) went on to work on stuff like Toast of London , and unlike Linehan hasn’t gone nuts (I like to think to that its less than he’s a transphobe , and more having mental issues and latched on to the TERF stuff, but yeah he’s in a good place right now )
That’s what I tell myself about ‘Black Books’. It’s at least half Dylan Moran, and to my knowledge he hasn’t drunk any TERF Kool-Aid.
IIRC Linehan left after the first season of Black Books as well, and it was mainly Moran after that.
Same thing with Motherland , which he worked on the first series , and dropped out after that .(although he was working with his wife as part of the team on it and they since split I think , so that may explain what’s going on , look I hope to god he finds some peace as I think he’s really gone off the deepend over the last few years , and I still reckon his whole TERF obsession is part of a much bigger problem)
I do have to wonder about what’s going on in Linehan’s head. I mean, I don’t want to enter apologia territory or anything, but there’s being a transphobic asshole and then there’s tumbling down the sheer bloody-minded rabbit-hole of monomaniacal obsession that he’s jumped into.
sorry that should read NOT in a good place right now.
Well, it felt obligatory that someone had to make sure this was posted under these circumstances.I would first and foremost like to showcase Dermot Morgan’s finest work and reflect on how he was taken far too soon. Ardal O’Hanlon of course was also excellent in this scene.
Well, that’s the saying with English celebrities: “You either die a hero or live long enough to become a TERF”
Linehan was doing Dave Chappelle’s act years before it was cool!
What else do you want them to do? Feed the hungry? Clothe the naked? Comfort the sick?
Take the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, which has condemned Benedetta as “pornographic filth” and “blasphemy against our spiritual Mother, the Holy Catholic Church.”They should put that on the poster. What a great endorsement!
“But frottage—a.k.a. scissoring, which the historical record mentions specifically, and Verhoeven re-creates faithfully”.Verhoeven did extensive research. Half the film’s budget went on Kleenex.
that’s not all that “went on the Kleenex”!
Come again?
You had me at “lesbian nun drama”.
Lefty Catholic. Very excited to see this.
Imagine back to being an aspiring writer entering college with wonderful ambition. What would you think if you could see yourself then writing a headline like “Lesbian nun drama Benedetta is both profane and sublime—no wonder some Catholics hate it”lol.
No name-checking The Little Hours in this review? For shame.
I suspect that’s closer in tone to the misbehaving nun movie most folks want to see.
I like to imagine if you went back in time to the year 1200 and showed the “The Little Hours”, medieval folks would absolutely love it.
I have a hard time believing that anyone loves the Canterbury Tales for the tales without all the super-dirty jokes.
I actually was let down–I guess I expected a lot from a Verhoeven lesbian nun movie, but it didn’t feel all that lurid at all. It was, dare I say it, remarkably restrained. Only in the dream sequences did it go for the gonzo-ness I wanted.
Agreed, it needed more robotic cops.
I like the final paragraph, though I am a little leery of how many marks of sexual abuse Benedetta’s relationship – Verhoeven’s lens aside – bears, but the two preceding claims are inaccurate.
First, Mortification of the Flesh is not a central Christian doctrine. It’s not central, you can take it or leave it even within the tradition to which Catholicism belongs, much less any others (a) and (b) it’s not a doctrine so much as a set of potentially spiritually helpful practices that were seen as having a high potential for abuse even within the church, and that should give anyone pause. There were saintly figures lauded for it, but also, particularly in the popular traditions, saintly figures lauded for finding it unnecessary.Second, priests aren’t between the faithful and God in the sense discussed here. Even in a very heightened sense, the formal tradition of Catholic mysticism as a way for lay people and non-priestly religious, particularly women, to establish sacred authority through direct connection to God was both centuries old and exceedingly conventional.
The hierarchy could and did see some individuals claiming this authority as a threat, but the mystical tradition itself was repeatedly written into the structures that attempted to regularize priestly authority (most importantly the third Lateran council – which forbade formal preaching for anyone not ordained as a deacon or priest, but did not dare to encroach on this practice).
St. Catherine of Sienna would have been one of the most famous and influential saintly cults in Early Modern Italy, and the crux of that mythology is that Catherine is able to resolve a Pope / Anti-Pope crisis by using her personal authority to coerce the factions involved into reconciliation.
Partly as a result of that popular story, this period was particularly marked by competition among various factions to capture women mystics as allies to their cause or to discredit them. Catherine is a very different figure from Benedetta, but most of that difference is contingent on political power – she could have been a Benedetta just as easily if she had been less successful and was one in communities invested in anti-Catholicism.
It’s not an existential threat, it’s an internal competition for conventional authority. And it’s not removed by centuries, those conservative Catholics groups increasingly have their own potential Benedettas/Catherines (complete with visions and abuses) as they struggle for increased authority outside of the hierarchy.I certainly wouldn’t claim that you can’t be appalled by the Catholic church’s clericalism or asceticism then or now, but promulgating these historical misconceptions, particularly within the ancient genre of Nunsploitation (a tradition as old as Milton), is both bad history and a way of obscuring the actual threat and agency possessed by these figures.
I read Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which was good. I don’t think I need to see a lurid movie with unrealistically hot young nuns–who both have long hair for some reason, going by the pic. Like, even if this movie has something to offer beyond the unrealistic hotness and long hair, as the review suggests it does, I personally am tired of non-women telling these kinds of stories. Do one set in a monastery, Verhoeven. Let’s see some men with tonsures going at it (and if I knew how to do gifs obviously I’d put in one from Tropic Thunder here).
I feel like this movie draws some pretty close parallels to Elizabeth Holmes – a bright kid who excelled because of theatrics, the strategic use of a deep voice and the promise of wealth for the people who enabled her.