Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta suggests a covert remake of the director’s 1995 trash masterpiece Showgirls, redressing the Vegas showgirls as late-Renaissance Italian nuns. Both films concern a woman who understands the power of her sex and weaponizes it to her advantage. Benedetta also shares a tone and, to some degree, a structure with Showgirls, as their irony-drenched comic sensibility clashes disconcertingly with a third-act betrayal that results in a rather distressing scene of sexual violence. The intrigue created by Verhoeven’s love of tonal clash and generalized profligacy doesn’t quite save Benedetta from feeling like it’s revealed its entire hand well before the credits roll, but while it’s hot, it’s hot.
Loosely adapted from Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Verhoeven’s film depicts nothing less than the pernicious lesbian takeover of the local church hierarchy in the Italian town of Pescia in Tuscany. It opens with the arrival of the young Benedetta Carlini (Elena Plonka) at the town’s abbey, where she’s greeted by the abbess, Felicita (Charlotte Rampling), and her full complement of severe nuns, one of whom quite frankly tells the newly arrived novice, “Your body is your worst enemy.”
Whether through cynical intent or genuine belief—it’s never entirely clear—this is the principle that Benedetta will subvert in a small religious revolution as an adult. Depending on how the viewer reads the film, this early moment may be when she realizes the hypocrisy and potential manipulability of a religious doctrine that believes in transcending the flesh when really it’s obsessed with the body and its contortions and transformations.
Believing that she has a personal connection to the Virgin Mary that may bespeak a longing for female companionship of a slightly different sort, Benedetta is almost immediately caught in flagranti with a wooden statue of Jesus’s mother whose breast is exposed, when the statue spontaneously tips over and, in essence, mounts Benedetta. Excited by the sudden, miraculous proximity of the Virgin Mary, the girl puts her mouth around the statue’s exposed nipple. Benedetta, as will be even more explicit when she’s fully grown, is a bit of a boob girl.
Verhoeven estranges us from the act of sex even as his attention to female anatomy conforms with the leeriest of male fantasies. He also often subverts our expectations of straightforward titillation. When the story flashes forward 18 years to join Benedetta (now played by Virginie Efira) still at the convent, his setting of the scene continues to impishly recall the kind of cheap play with the forbidden staged by many a porno and exploitation film. And the pornographic vibes intensify when Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) arrives at the abbey, fleeing her sexually abusive father. A hesitant but significant exchange of looks between the women hints at what’s (and who’s) to come—and then we’re given a scene of the two chatting while sitting next to each other on commodes, farting loudly and cleaning themselves with hay.
The romance must wait while taboos are first broken and the established order begins to crumble. Benedetta, as a nun “married to God,” has vivid encounters with Jesus (Jonathan Couzinie) in visions that look like cheaply lit vignettes you might see in low-budget Christian video propaganda. Verhoeven and co-screenwriter David Birke infuse these scenes with a Freudian sexual fetishism—snakes, a gang of rapists—that men imagine women to possess. The young nun’s profound communion with the Lord splits the local Church, between the doubtful abbess and her most loyal sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte), who also have inklings of what’s developing between the women, and the local provost (Olivier Rabourdin) who sees the potential of raising his own status by elevating Benedetta as a divine messenger.
Throughout Benedetta, Verhoeven certainly builds up a heady, campy mix of religious imagery, corporeal abjectness, and masochism, emphasizing the centrality of the body, and particularly the female body, in the configuration of power. And by the time that Benedetta has ascended the ranks of Pescia’s nunnery, a certain long-delayed sex scene is every bit as gleefully gratuitous and flagrantly blasphemous as everything else up to that point.
In the comedown from the early climax of that sex scene, though, the plot doesn’t feel as tightly controlled. Bartolomea and Benedetta’s relationship, based purely in carnal lust, is suddenly treated as a fated romance. The betrayals and reconciliations needed to move the plot forward come too quickly, hinging on about-turns in character. It’s not that the continued perversity of the final act loses all sense of fun, or that what the film has to say about sex and power evaporates. But it does feel at times like Rampling’s cool, rationally minded Felicita, who believes in the Church more as an administrative body than as a conduit of God’s message, is the only major character with consistent motivation in the film’s final scenes.
A searingly caustic take on the sublimation of sexuality into the practices and imagery of Catholicism and the fundamental role of the body in grounding Church doctrine, Benedetta challenges its audience on a number of fronts—not the least of which our utter lack of interest in the conventional morals aligned with either sex or God, in either this century or the 17th. Not unlike a Renaissance dildo made of whittled-down wood, Verhoeven’s film is ultimately uneven and dangerously provocative, but it’s also a lot of fun.
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