Benedetta

dir: Paul Verhoeven

2021

Truly fucked up nun bullshit. Can’t summarise it any better than that.

I am sure this probably would play very differently to someone who is a) a believer, b) Christian, c) Catholic especially, but to me it emphasises nothing more so than how delusional religious types have to be. Or at least how delusional Verhoeven thinks they must be.

I find myself in a curious position with this film, in that I find it almost impossible to give an old letch like Verhoeven the benefit of the doubt, ever, in fact, but especially when it comes to his movies. He has just done too many horrible things to too many people, predominately women, in too many of his movies for it to be a coincidence. Because I read too many pop culture / movie review sites, I am too aware of this perverse attempt to garner consensus at least online to pretend Showgirls is some kind of camp classic, up there with Mommie Dearest, Rocky Horror Picture Show or Hairspray.

I am totally against this – I reject it completely. Showgirls always was and always will be a horrible, boring, misogynistic and thoroughly loathsome movie. These attempts to reclaim it disgust me.

But for the utter trash films that he’s made, like the aforementioned, and Basic Instinct, and Hollow Man, he did make Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers and Black Book, so, I’m torn. I want to condemn him for what I think his work sometimes represents (a tendency and casualness towards exploiting female actors and in depicting sexual abuse and sexualised violence), but then there are those aspects that confuse me, seeing as his other works indicate an awareness of what the use of violence in entertainment means in a societal context, even beyond the visceral thrill audiences may get.

He also has no problem having his actors sitting around naked for hours at a time. I hope they were okay with it.

Now he’s turning his interest towards the use of the visceral in terms of how it applies to religious mania and, more importantly, religious control.

Benedetta has plenty of risqué scenes, plenty of stuff other directors would have thought better than include, but it has strong acting performances and an actual story, such as it is. The point may be to provide Verhoeven with stroke material (while it’s even being filmed), but at least the (simulated) sex on screen has a purpose within the story.

Benedetta herself is given as a bride to Christ at an early age by parents who strangely seem to really like her. Even though the flick is in French, it is set in Italy, in Pescia, in the 17th Century, as the black plague lurks around every European nook and cranny, waiting for the sinful to fuck up so God can get revenge by killing everyone.

At least that’s how these simpletons seem to think. Before the little girl goes into the cloistered life, a band of soldiers or bandits waylay them, trying to steal her mother’s necklace. Young Benedetta informs these jerks that the Virgin Mary herself speaks to her and protects her from harm. To prove her point, a bird drops its bundle straight into the eye of one of the jerkier of the bandits, and they laughingly see this as either evidence of divine protection, or, more so, as courage that deserves the reward of not being robbed.

Once within the convent walls, the child is led into her new life, the crabby nun who introduces her to this new life of suffering tells her that the body, her body, is a terrible thing, and that the mortification of the flesh is what Jesus wants above anything else.

Fucked up message to be telling a kid, but it’s kind of a mission statement for a film like this. The central belief of the time, and probably now still, for many Catholics, for many godbotherers, is that the body is evil, and hurting and harming it somehow pleases Jesus. Let’s be real, though, Jesus never really said he wanted his followers to hurt people or themselves, but go figure.

There are scenes of people being tortured. There are scenes of people torturing themselves.

On one level you might feel compelled, even as a non-believer, to point out that this must stem from a misreading of the gospels, of human confusion over divine will versus the difficulty of governing our own impulses. Almost every religion (pretends) to prize asceticism, wherein self-denial, self-abnegation, self-discipline etc is seen as the pinnacle of religious devotion.

And yet none of the people at the top of the religious hierarchies ever look like they’ve skipped a meal, or like their raiments or surplices or gold threaded robes are anything but comfortable in their measurements.

In Benedetta (played as an adult by Virginie Efira) we are given a person who doesn’t know anything about the body, her own body, or human sexuality (yet), who experiences what she feels are visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, but she also seems fairly ignorant even of religious doctrine, and how it pertains to ones’ experience of one’s own senses.

Also, she has a deep misunderstanding of the notion of suffering, and how it gets one closer to God, just like that classic piece of Scripture from Nine Inch Nails tells us. She, at different times, thinks inflicting pain on herself, for no good reason, or on others, will somehow make Jesus appear on command or love her more or something equally dreary.

She has no doubt that she is seeing the actual Jesus when she has what the rest of us would call vivid hallucinations. Her interactions with him seem to be very…intense.

He is, from the perspective of the nuns, their husband, after all. There is this frenzied aspect to how much she is convinced that these visions have to get her closer to something, but she’s not entirely sure what.

Of course, this will surprise no one, her “visions” take a darker turn when she sees herself being attacked by groups of bandits who want to torment her, in the worst possible way. This manifests, outside of her consciousness, in screaming and carrying on so loud and terrifying that the whole convent can hear it, and the other nuns tie her down for her own safety.

Soon after, she’s “spontaneously” manifesting stigmata, the wounds of Christ from the cross, to convince everyone that she must genuinely be touched by the Divine, in more ways than one.

I am not sure if it’s a coincidence, but the transition of her experiences, from solely in her own mind, to manifesting in the real world, happens to occur only after a new novice, being Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), enters the convent. The much younger girl, fleeing from an abusive father, adores the older nun Benedetta, and, in one of the many indications of creepiness that Verhoeven is known for, goes from talking about being sexually abused by her father and brothers to physically making moves on the older nun.

Huh? What the absolute fuck?

You can either turn the movie off now in disgust, or leave the theatre, or you’ve committed to signing up for what will be a deeply fucked up journey to the finish line.

When the nuns are gathered together singing hymns of joy praising God’s overall awesomeness, Bartolomea sneaks up right behind Benedetta, and, um, inserts a finger where it wasn’t expected or asked for.

It can’t be a coincidence that this triggers an ecstatic vision, can it?

Whether people genuinely believe that Benedetta is some kind of living saint, there are those, like the local priest, who seems trusting, and the local prelate with pretensions of becoming the next bishop of Milan who see this as an opportunity. If they can convince everyone else that Benedetta’s visions are real, her stigmata are visited upon her by Christ, and that the spooky voice she sometimes uses does indicate that she is The One protecting Pescia from the plague, then the money will roll right in.

The mother superior of the convent, though, she ain’t so sure. The Abbess (Charlotte Rampling) doesn’t believe for a second that Benedetta is on the level, but also sees no reason to contradict the priests. She is cynical enough to see the angles, but not so formal and set in her ways that she’ll go against the hierarchy for what she knows is likely true.

She is secretly the star of the flick. She goes from being the abbess of a convent, to being cast aside, to warning her own daughter (who happens to be a nun as well) against pursuing what she knows is true, to catching the plague, to getting her final revenge against the real villain (The Church itself, in the person of the so-called nuncio (Lambert Wilson), before going out in a blaze of glory like an absolute boss.

There is a lot of sex, a lot of nudity, a lot of torture, a lot of awfulness on display. The flick manages also to have its cake and eat it too, not really keeping you wondering as to whether Benedetta believes her own bullshit or not.

If we reach some kind of resolution, it’s that maybe she is bullshitting about everything, but then maybe she still believes her lies are all part of God’s great plan.

The path that she is on seems like it will end only one way. This flick is cleverer than that, and resulted in, what was for me, quite a surprise of an ending.

This is not a message movie. There is no moral. In terrible times, people will believe terrible things, and do even worse. If they hated themselves a bit less, and were less inclined to inflict misery on others, maybe the god whose favor they claim to want would favor them more. And then they’d be better placed to help each other to survive.

It is a pretty solid movie overall. The central performances, of Bendetta and Bartolomea, and especially Charlotte Rampling, really make this a strong film, even as it degenerates into madness towards the end.

Especially because it degenerates into madness towards the end.

8 times all hail the new flesh of Saint Benedetta out of 10

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“Did you look lustfully at Abbess Benedetta?”
- “From one woman to another; it is impossible.”
“Apparently, this convent widens the horizon of the possible.” – women loving women? Now I’ve heard everything! - Benedetta