Bless Us ‘Benedetta,’ For Paul Verhoeven Has Sinned [Cannes Review]

For just a moment, as a particularly sepulchral stretch of Anne Dudley‘s liturgical score plays over a solemn black screen emblazoned with the words “inspired by real events,” you might think Paul Verhoeven‘s gone and gotten serious on us, and that “Benedetta,” his hotly lusted-after Cannes title is going to be, whisper it, tasteful. About 73 seconds later, little Benedetta, the pious, doted-upon daughter of a wealthy lord who’s on her way to become a nun, performs her first “miracle” and gets a bird to shit magnificently into a guy’s eye — phew. If you imagine the guy representing Christian orthodoxy (he doesn’t, but whatever) the eye-shitting is a perfect metaphor for what Verhoeven is about to unleash, but it’s also a signal of exactly where his heart lies — with bodily functions and bodily fluids: a distinctly earthy disdain for the ethereal. Shit, fingering, shit-fingering, blood, buboes, and a lot of boobs lie in store, plus a little wooden Virgin Mary statue that will be fashioned into a dildo in such a way that we can watch the Virgin’s head bobbing gently back and forth in time with the user’s orgasmic convulsions. It looks like she’s waving.

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“Benedetta” is a hoot, but, unlike the virgin dildo, and unlike Verhoeven’s last brilliant provocation “Elle,” it isn’t particularly penetrating. Perhaps that’s hardly surprising given that the primary source on which it is based — a 17th-century court clerk’s account of the Catholic church’s only known lesbian trial — is apparently less about Big Ideas than the shaky, frequently erased and overwritten transcription of its more irresistibly salacious details. It’s these details that Verhoeven and David Birke‘s screenplay, which is adapted from a book based on the shook clerk’s writings, leans into heavily, and with Verhoeven on perhaps the most overtly tacky directorial form we’ve seen from him since “Showgirls” the defiantly secular miracle here is that any themes emerge at all. 

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They just about do — the first being an acidly satirical view of the hypocrisy and greed of the church as the family rolls up to the convent in Pescia, Tuscany, and Benedetta’s father gets into an unseemly haggling situation with Charlotte Rampling’s hard-headed Abbess over the “dowry” he must pay in order for his daughter to become the Bride of Christ. They settle on a price closer to her suggestion than his, obviously, as who could possibly withstand Rampling’s steely glare? Benedetta exchanges her fine silks for a scratchy shift, and when she complains is told “Your worst enemy is your body. It is best not to feel too at home in it.”  Outside, a mime sets his farts on fire. 

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18 years and a couple of maybe-miracles later (one of which involves Benedetta licking the exposed breast of a Virgin Mary-via-Janet-Jackson-Wardrobe-Malfunction statue that has fallen on top of her suggestively) Benedetta is now played by frequently brave (read: naked) Virginie Efira. The plague that is ravaging the country has not yet reached Pescia’s gates, but peril of a different order arrives in the comely form of Bartholomea (Daphné Patakia), a runaway the Abbess agrees to shelter (for a price), and to whom Benedetta sparks up an immediate, slightly S&M-inflected attraction. All the while Benedetta has been having regular chatty visits with a hunky Jesus, which may be true visions, may be fantasies born of sexual stirrings or may be deliberate fabrications that she somehow knows will ultimately maneuver her into a position of power. 

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But if big-eyed Bartholomea becomes her ally and then her lover (both of them getting brave so often you worry they’ll catch a chill), Benedetta also has an enemy in Sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte), the Abbess’ daughter. When Benedetta suddenly sprouts stigmata and is installed as Abbess in her mother’s place, Christina’s hostility flares into an all-out war which culminates in her literal downfall, in a wildly Gothic-garish scene ripped from “Black Narcissus” by way of “Vertigo.” And so the ex-Abbess, now busted down to Sister Felicita, becomes Benedetta’s chief antagonist, which is fun because Rampling is having a blast here and in her delivery, the script’s sarkiest lines land like flints sparking. At first relatively pragmatic about the usefulness of Benedetta’s potential martyrdom for the local community — as she points out, Assisi was little more than a wide spot in the road before Francis’ celebrity made it a thriving tourist hub — now she dedicates herself to Benedetta’s exposure. Given that Benedetta and Bartholemea have been exposing themselves to each other for some time, she has quite some ammo. She brings in the Papal Nuncio, played by a hilariously oily, sneery Lambert Wilson, and under a comet-reddened sky he arrives, trailing sexual hypocrisy and the Black Death, from which Benedetta has claimed Jesus will spare Pescia, given her status as one of his favourite wives. (The closing of the city’s gates against outsiders, and the last-minute capitulation when the Nuncio demands entry is weirdly reminiscent of Cannes’ Covid policy in regards to international travel.)

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There’s a very slightly threadbare nature to the production — crowd scenes that could maybe have used a couple more extras; unconvincingly CG-ed vision-snakes; city streets that seem surfaced in substances that won’t be invented for another century or two; tears on Efira’s face that carve little channels in her period-inaccurate foundation. But all of it is somehow self-aware, as even is the odd casting of the unmistakably sexy 44-year-old Efira as a presumably 20-something virginal nun. That maturity gives her version of Benedetta an archness that is entirely in keeping with Verhoeven’s sly tone, the same mischievous perspective that allows him to just about get away with scenes of torture and sexual violence, and the random pregnant woman who proudly pulls out a heavy breast and squirts milk at Charlotte Rampling (file under: never thought I’d write that.)

But if the knowing, kitchsy approach gets him off the hook, it also counts as Verhoeven playing it relatively safe. In an age where most mainstream filmmakers still pull their punches about faith like they’re thinking of running for office someday and may need to court the Evangelical right, it’s refreshing to get a dose of the Dutch trickster’s unambiguous insistence on religious belief as an inherently lunatic, absurd thing. But “Benedetta” doesn’t match the transgressive, blasphemous heights of, say, Ken Russell‘s “The Devils” (in which it wasn’t merely a wooden doll being used as a dildo but a charred human femur), because it ends all its scenes with a wink and a nudge. But if “Benedetta” is a joke that Verhoeven is in on, and that is designed to play to those in on it too, we can at least be thankful that it’s a good joke — not that there’s anyone up there to be thankful to. [B/B+]

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