Benedetta

A harrowing two hours. Basic Instinct was also bold, unpredictable and full of eroticism, but it was made by a filmmaker at the peak of his powers, not an old man who obviously has a head full of shit even in his 80s and is trying his best to translate it to the screen in the most controversial style possible, but unfortunately that's about it. (12/17/2021)

Lesbian nunspoitation by Verhoeven set in a 17th century Tuscan monastery. Verhoeven has made an unconventional erotic religious drama that is not afraid of nudity and violence. The actress who plays Benedetta, Virginie Efira, looks very good at 45, and her full frontal nude will please many a male eye, but the rebellious Daphne Patakia looks good too – she is the hottest nun I have ever seen. The combination of sinful nuns and a corrupt Christian institution works surprisingly well. The historical period where Europe was gripped by the Plague, the very intense and exciting lesbian sex scenes, the Stigmata vignettes, the great nightmares of Benedetta (the snake scene or the brutal killing of the knights, surprised by the raw gore). I liked the harsh rules the nuns had to follow and the intense finale is solid, with a cool trial, torture and chaos of the townspeople. The pacing is slower in places, but the film managed to keep my attention thanks to the attractive interludes. Definitely a noteworthy affair. (12/11/2022)

Somehow I feel that since Paul Verhoeven turned eighty, he now has no need to please anyone, and so he just went and made a completely self-indulgent new movie. I think that the end result is a total nunsploitation B-movie rather than an A-grade art movie. The director once again shows off his great ability to be provocative and his black sense of humor. I am still a huge fan and therefore probably going to watch anything he makes, however, I know that Benedetta is definitely not going to be a movie for everyone. [KVIFF 2021] (08/28/2021)

Verhoeven devoted his entire oeuvre to bringing back to the sacred (genre) worlds the profane (excessively physical and emotional) aspects that had been pushed out of them by the previous tradition. His (perhaps only for now) last film thus represents a magnificent culmination of this effort, as he turns his attention to the Church itself, following his treatment of Hollywood genres and national historical milestones and local social phenomena. Benedetta thus delivers a caustically funny deconstruction of the Church as a pragmatic apparatus based on the illusion of hope. As in his previous films, this time Verhoeven offers a seemingly one-dimensional spectacle. But lying just below the wholly functional (in terms of genre) and, for many, outrageous, grim and entertaining surface, there is a broad spectrum of thought-provoking layers. For some, Benedetta will remain a cynical or even exploitative and objectifying mess, but for others it will be, among other things, a sophisticated portrait of the wonderfully ambiguous title character. Through her, personal and organised faith is revealed to be an instrument of institutional and personal power and, paradoxically, within a certain historical context, of possible emancipation, though only in the sense of career and existence, but peculiarly not in terms of personal freedom. And, through the protagonist’s development, it also shows that spiritual foolishness and physical orgasm have more in common than many want to admit. (09/03/2021)

Set in a 17th-century Italian convent against the backdrop of a plague epidemic, this erotic film about nuns is a rather uneven attempt to raise its B-movie foundation, drawing primarily on the tradition of Italian exploitation flicks with nuns (so-called “nunsploitation”), to the level of a top-tier festival film. Paul Verhoeven threw into it his trademarks and favorite obsessions including, for example, caustic irony, sadism and perversion, and feminism, in this case spiced up with a mocking critique of the Church as a hypocritical institution controlled by power interests and standing in the way of sexual freedom. We follow the story of a young nun, who is experiencing very vivid visions of manifestations of Christ and undergoing a lesbian awakening with a newly arrived novice, from her childhood in a series of sacrilegious escapades, whose true origins are shrouded in mystery (perhaps a divine miracle, maybe just an act with a profit-seeking objective) and are the driving force of the entire film. Through most of its runtime, the film veers between a low-brow black-humor farce about the abuse of believers’ gullibility (with flatulence, defecation, playful pornographic motifs and the figure of Jesus Christ in the role of protector, who fearlessly decapitates enemies and beasts) and an agonizing serious drama with classical music and naturalistic violence, dealing with a delirious woman prone to self-harm and the negative impacts of fanatical faith. The clash of these two tonally contradictory approaches is quite problematic and unsatisfying, but perhaps that doesn’t matter to Verhoeven, as he probably just wanted to have a good romp and be a bit provocative and outrageous, which he succeeded in doing. Because of that, Benedetta falls into the category of borderline guilty-pleasure entertainment suitable for midnight festival screenings that will divide audiences, and in which the acting highlight is not the performances of the actresses portraying the lesbian couple, but that of Charlotte Rampling in the supporting (though essential and noteworthy) role of the sceptical mother superior. (09/03/2021)