Post by Dracula on Dec 8, 2021 10:47:11 GMT -5
Benedetta(12/4/2021)
For a while there it seemed like Paul Verhoeven was done. Though his last two movies in Hollywood, Starship Troopers and Hollow Man were both basically financial successes the opportunities still seemed to dry up for him in the 2000s as Hollywood became increasingly franchise oriented and PG-13ified. There just wasn’t room for a provocateur like him when Hollywood’s idea of a success started looking less like Basic Instinct and more like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Then he returned to his home country of the Netherlands and it seemed like he’d simply restart his career there and in 2007 we got a slick World War II spy movie called Black Book that didn’t set the world on fire but was generally positively received. But despite that success we wouldn’t see another Paul Verhoeven movie for another ten years and given his relatively advanced age it was hard to tell if that was just a matter of him not being able to find funding or if he’d given up and gone into retirement. Turns out he did still have gas in the tank however as he kind of came roaring back with his 2016 French film Elle, a film that managed to walk a very fine line in telling a story about rape and seemingly wound up managing to avoid strong controversy and earning Isabelle Huppert an Oscar nomination. Clearly working in France seemed work well for him as he’s made his follow-up to Elle in that country as well with much of the same production team: a characteristically provocative film about the intersection of religion and sexuality called Benedetta.
Though the film is in the French language it is actually set in Italy during the early 17th century and is a fictionalized account of the life of the real life nun and mystic Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) who had been living at an abbey in a Tuscan town called Pescia since her adolescence. From a young age Carlini describes getting certain signs and visions from god but they really seem to come to the fore in her early twenties after the Abbey takes in another wayward young woman named Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) and her visions become more vivid than before and she starts exhibiting signs of it like an incident where she seems to experience the stigmata. A lot of people within the convent believe these visions and Carlini picks up something of a following within the surrounding countryside but she is not universally believed and something of a battle of wills between Carlini and covenant’s abbess (Charlotte Rampling) and another nun named Christina (Louise Chevillotte) and things will become even more heated once it’s learned that Carlini has been having a lesbian affair with Bartolomea.
Now, I know what this looks like. “Lesbian nuns” is an inherently salacious topic and with Paul Verhoeven’s reputation as a provocateur who shoots pervy scenes it’s pretty easy to assume that this is going to basically be an exploitation movie that exists to offend the easily offended prudes of the world… and I can’t say it’s entirely not that. The film certainly uses nudity more liberally than your average movie and there are definitely things in the presence of a dildo carved out of a Jesus statue that are certainly in the Bunuelian tradition of prodding at Catholic iconography. Having said that, this isn’t like a Lars Von Trier movie or something that only exists to piss people off and it also isn’t a movie that’s made inaccessible through complicated symbolism either. In general it’s a fairly earnest attempt at telling this true story and explore some of the religious and thematic implications of the story.
At the center of it all is the question of whether Carlini is on the level about her visions or is she faking them in order to gain status and attention. And if she is honest about them are they merely the delusions of an unhinged fanatic or are they in fact actual messages from God… or perhaps messages from the devil. The film never really falls on any one of these answers and there are scenes in the film that seem to pretty strongly support every one of these interpretations. We do see some of her “visions” produced and displayed in the movie, so clearly she is seeing something and likely isn’t making her story up from whole cloth, but on the other hand there are moments where you can clearly see her manipulating the situations in ways that invite fairly cynical readings. For example when she has “the stigmata” we are shown that she did in fact have the motive and the means to have faked this with a piece of glass and there’s another point where she “predicts” that someone will be cursed with the plague but only after having discovered a tell-tale boil first. At one point she suggests to Bartolomea that maybe she is faking certain things but only because God is telling her to do so, but there are other points like when she seems to speak in a man’s voice that sure seem like they defy rational explanation.
You also see some of the various interpretations in the ways the people around her react to all of this and their responses are likely to make certain points about society at large. The people of Pescia and some of the lower level nuns at the Abbey seem eager to believe her out of a sort of instinctive desire to believe while others like the local priest sees enough “miracles” and is happy to go along with it. Meanwhile The Abess seems kind of agnostic about the “miracles” but mostly views the situation based on how it will affect her status while Christina is straightforwardly skeptical and wants to expose Carlini at all costs. Bartolomea on the other hand views the whole thing as a likely scam, but digs it at a scam against those in power which she can benefit from as Carlini’s lover. By contrast The Nuncio seems less interested in whether these visions are true or not than he is in putting these women in their place. It’s all a bit complicated, but perhaps not quite complicated enough. Verhoeven wants to maintain a certain level of ambiguity to all this but perhaps goes a bit too far in certain directions so as to replace ambiguity with evidence that is just plainly contradictory. He’s also makes his film while still working in a relatively accessible film grammar that is perhaps a bit less adventurous than some audiences may want from their European provocations but which may be a benefit to others. I’d say the overall film is actually less difficult than this year’s other major provocation from France, Julia Ducournau’s Titane, which has probably rightly become the bigger arthouse sensation. Still, by the standard of most of what you’re likely to see this is some good scandalous and sexy stuff that’s more than worth a watch.
**** out of Five
For a while there it seemed like Paul Verhoeven was done. Though his last two movies in Hollywood, Starship Troopers and Hollow Man were both basically financial successes the opportunities still seemed to dry up for him in the 2000s as Hollywood became increasingly franchise oriented and PG-13ified. There just wasn’t room for a provocateur like him when Hollywood’s idea of a success started looking less like Basic Instinct and more like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Then he returned to his home country of the Netherlands and it seemed like he’d simply restart his career there and in 2007 we got a slick World War II spy movie called Black Book that didn’t set the world on fire but was generally positively received. But despite that success we wouldn’t see another Paul Verhoeven movie for another ten years and given his relatively advanced age it was hard to tell if that was just a matter of him not being able to find funding or if he’d given up and gone into retirement. Turns out he did still have gas in the tank however as he kind of came roaring back with his 2016 French film Elle, a film that managed to walk a very fine line in telling a story about rape and seemingly wound up managing to avoid strong controversy and earning Isabelle Huppert an Oscar nomination. Clearly working in France seemed work well for him as he’s made his follow-up to Elle in that country as well with much of the same production team: a characteristically provocative film about the intersection of religion and sexuality called Benedetta.
Though the film is in the French language it is actually set in Italy during the early 17th century and is a fictionalized account of the life of the real life nun and mystic Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) who had been living at an abbey in a Tuscan town called Pescia since her adolescence. From a young age Carlini describes getting certain signs and visions from god but they really seem to come to the fore in her early twenties after the Abbey takes in another wayward young woman named Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) and her visions become more vivid than before and she starts exhibiting signs of it like an incident where she seems to experience the stigmata. A lot of people within the convent believe these visions and Carlini picks up something of a following within the surrounding countryside but she is not universally believed and something of a battle of wills between Carlini and covenant’s abbess (Charlotte Rampling) and another nun named Christina (Louise Chevillotte) and things will become even more heated once it’s learned that Carlini has been having a lesbian affair with Bartolomea.
Now, I know what this looks like. “Lesbian nuns” is an inherently salacious topic and with Paul Verhoeven’s reputation as a provocateur who shoots pervy scenes it’s pretty easy to assume that this is going to basically be an exploitation movie that exists to offend the easily offended prudes of the world… and I can’t say it’s entirely not that. The film certainly uses nudity more liberally than your average movie and there are definitely things in the presence of a dildo carved out of a Jesus statue that are certainly in the Bunuelian tradition of prodding at Catholic iconography. Having said that, this isn’t like a Lars Von Trier movie or something that only exists to piss people off and it also isn’t a movie that’s made inaccessible through complicated symbolism either. In general it’s a fairly earnest attempt at telling this true story and explore some of the religious and thematic implications of the story.
At the center of it all is the question of whether Carlini is on the level about her visions or is she faking them in order to gain status and attention. And if she is honest about them are they merely the delusions of an unhinged fanatic or are they in fact actual messages from God… or perhaps messages from the devil. The film never really falls on any one of these answers and there are scenes in the film that seem to pretty strongly support every one of these interpretations. We do see some of her “visions” produced and displayed in the movie, so clearly she is seeing something and likely isn’t making her story up from whole cloth, but on the other hand there are moments where you can clearly see her manipulating the situations in ways that invite fairly cynical readings. For example when she has “the stigmata” we are shown that she did in fact have the motive and the means to have faked this with a piece of glass and there’s another point where she “predicts” that someone will be cursed with the plague but only after having discovered a tell-tale boil first. At one point she suggests to Bartolomea that maybe she is faking certain things but only because God is telling her to do so, but there are other points like when she seems to speak in a man’s voice that sure seem like they defy rational explanation.
You also see some of the various interpretations in the ways the people around her react to all of this and their responses are likely to make certain points about society at large. The people of Pescia and some of the lower level nuns at the Abbey seem eager to believe her out of a sort of instinctive desire to believe while others like the local priest sees enough “miracles” and is happy to go along with it. Meanwhile The Abess seems kind of agnostic about the “miracles” but mostly views the situation based on how it will affect her status while Christina is straightforwardly skeptical and wants to expose Carlini at all costs. Bartolomea on the other hand views the whole thing as a likely scam, but digs it at a scam against those in power which she can benefit from as Carlini’s lover. By contrast The Nuncio seems less interested in whether these visions are true or not than he is in putting these women in their place. It’s all a bit complicated, but perhaps not quite complicated enough. Verhoeven wants to maintain a certain level of ambiguity to all this but perhaps goes a bit too far in certain directions so as to replace ambiguity with evidence that is just plainly contradictory. He’s also makes his film while still working in a relatively accessible film grammar that is perhaps a bit less adventurous than some audiences may want from their European provocations but which may be a benefit to others. I’d say the overall film is actually less difficult than this year’s other major provocation from France, Julia Ducournau’s Titane, which has probably rightly become the bigger arthouse sensation. Still, by the standard of most of what you’re likely to see this is some good scandalous and sexy stuff that’s more than worth a watch.
**** out of Five
