Benedetta

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. (2021-09-03)

If it was cut down to 90 minutes, I would say that it is a daring erotic-religious psychological thriller portraying temptation and desire for forbidden fruit from the point of view of two nuns who find their way to each other through sexual practices, of which there is no shortage and which are also quite explicit. This is also the reason for the audience's enthusiasm, because Paul Verhoeven is a big name in the field and when he takes on something as unorthodox and "new" as Benedetta, he simply reaps success. However, it's perhaps a little too long and drawn out for me, and apart from the religious dialogue, which is nothing interesting, and the eroticism, there's not really much and the film didn't leave a deeper mark on me as a result. I can understand the enthusiastic response, but I can equally understand the audience's dissatisfaction. I'm somewhere in between, but I tend to lean towards the latter group, unfortunately. (2021-11-30)

Benedetta has spent most of her life in a convent, but now besides God, she started to love Bartolomea... what initially appears as a drama about forbidden love, in Paul Verhoeven's direction turns into a provocative and unpredictable story that opens up a lot of interesting topics and cleverly manipulates with the audience, their expectations, and the way it processes what happens to the protagonists on the screen. Equally daring, cynical, clever, and entertaining as the director's greatest classics. (2021-11-22)

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. (2021-09-03)

Judging by the reviews and comments, Verhoeven has a specific charm through which he can surprise the viewer with every film he makes by how he deconstructs something, even though he's basically been doing nothing else his whole life. Whatever he touches – genre, society, period, zeitgeist, character studies, or the subject matter – he dissects down to the flesh, laughs nihilistically, drops the mic, and heads off for some other revision. Benedetta is an interesting blend of his earlier Flesh+Blood, (an exploitation of a medieval era full of filthy bandits, plagues, degenerate church representatives, and naked harlots) Showgirls/Keetje Tippel (an ambitious woman uses her body to rise on the backs of others in an emeritus, ossified world) and Basic Instinct (ambivalence and uncertainty about where the truth lies and whether it should be sought out is maintained until the very end). And I was intrigued by the extent to which it treats the theme of religious ecstasy as an erotic experience in a similar way to Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. Verhoeven's last two films under French productions have been marked by clearly the best scripts he's ever had, but unfortunately also the ugliest direction. Benedetta often looks like footage from a musical, looking terribly staged and artificial. It's funny, then, that the erotic passages work best in this framework, as they're reminiscent of the usual porn videos you have open on the next tab. (2022-03-09)