#452: Benedetta
The man who gave you ‘Robocop’ and ‘Starship Troopers’ brings nunsploitation to a new generation
Initial release: 2021
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Jesus, Paul. Really clasting those icons, huh?
Sorry, sorry, I just got done watching the legendary Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta and I’m still reeling a bit. Exploitation films will do that to you, of course, and Benedetta is nothing if not a stunning example of a modern exploitation film; though, like many such films as were cranked out by the boatload in the 1970s, the question is: is Verhoeven being provocative for the sake of it, or is there a cogent point amidst the explicit melding of faith and female sexuality? I suspect, as is often the case with Verhoeven’s films, the answer is both.
Based on the story of a real person who lived at the turn of the 17th century as detailed in Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Verhoeven introduces Sister Benedetta as a child who, on her way to the nunnery that her parents promised her to as an infant, foils a bandit attack by telling them that she speaks with the Virgin Mary herself, who subsequently (as Benedetta tells it) sends a bird to poop on the bandit leader. Upon arriving at the nunnery, she is told that “your worst enemy is your body.”
Years later, as an adult, Benedetta has become a charismatic young woman who nevertheless is plagued by vivid dreams and visions of Jesus, often in ways that push the logical conclusion of the notion that nuns are “brides of Christ.” The relationship she strikes up with a recent arrival named Bartolomea explores the boundaries between religion and sexuality (if you know, you know) as Benedetta — and, indeed, her fellow nuns, one of whom is a former prostitute, another a convert from Judaism — is fully aware of her position in an institution that does not, as a rule, value women or their bodies, certainly not in the reactionary era of the anti-protestant Counter-Reformation.
That institution is embodied in none other than Lambert Wilson as a nameless papal envoy who comes to investigate Benedetta after her primary accuser commits suicide following a public humiliation during the night of a comet. Arriving from plague-stricken Florence, he represents a very masculine sort of religious hypocrisy, which Benedetta accurately calls him out on. Whether or not Benedetta is a fraud is left up in the air for much of the film, regardless of the convenient timing of her repeated episodes of stigmata and the ostensible voice of Christ berating all her doubters through her, but as far as the men who run the Church are concerned there can be no doubt as to their chicanery.
Verhoeven has thrown together so much into this film — from plague, to the comet, to the oft-competing ambitions of church officials (including Benedetta) to increasingly bizarre and erotic religious dream sequences to an abundance of full-frontal female nudity to sex scenes that border on the outright pornographic — that Verhoeven has a little difficulty in tying it all together. As the film nears its bloody climax, several of these disparate threads come together in a way that only seems satisfying in spite of itself.
It’s hard not to draw a connection between this film and Ken Russell’s notorious 1971 film The Devils, another ambitious and provocative nunsploitation film with similar themes of sexuality intermingled with faith; but Benedetta is not The Devils by a long shot, which is ironic because The Devils is exactly the kind of movie Verhoeven would make, at least back during his heyday when he was brutally skewering the capitalist golden age of the 1980s with Robocop. Benedetta is cleaner, tamer and, ultimately, doesn’t have as much to say.
