I sit down to write this review as the Supreme Court of the United States (the country in which I currently reside) sits poised to uphold a Mississippi law that bars abortion after 15 weeks. The case comes on the heels of Texas blocking access to all abortion services beyond six weeks of pregnancy. These recent developments in body terrorism are indicative of the culmination of a decades-long effort on the part of evangelical conservatives to reverse the landmark decision heralded by Roe v. Wade that legalised abortion nationwide.
Paul Verhoeven has always followed American politics closely and, in the midst of an anti-women and anti-queer culture war fuelled by plague madness, the 83 year old director has given us a gorgeously blasphemous epic about just that very topic. That the real life subject Benedetta (played by a cherubic Virginie Efira) was herself brought into the world through a labour that almost killed both her and her mother is almost too synchronistic with our cultural moment. But though he has been lambasted and praised over the years for his joyously over the top approach, his garishness has never deformed into insusceptibility. The Dutch provocateur is nothing if not consistently “on the pulse” regardless of decade when it comes to sex, censorship, and women’s bodies as commodity. Verhoeven is explicit, but that is not to be mistaken for didacticism.
Paul Verhoeven has always followed American politics closely and, in the midst of an anti-women and anti-queer culture war fuelled by plague madness, the 83 year old director has given us a gorgeously blasphemous epic about just that very topic.
Based on Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Benedetta dramatises the fantastical and erotic events surrounding supposed lesbian nun Benedetta Carlini, who took a Theatine convent by storm in 1613 Tuscany with her manifestation of stigmatic wounds following rapturous visions of Jesus Christ. Verhoeven has sped up the course of events for the sake of titillating brevity, but the core details of the story remain relatively the same as those written down by first hand sources. A fallen Saint Mary statue that inspires spiritual sapphic desire, a mass of nuns self flagellating to the point of blood draw, a carved wooden dildo, nightly trysts full of tribbing, post-reformation torture practices; these salacious details of the story take centre stage in Verhoeven’s version, standing naked in the stark light of Jeanne Lapoirie’s ascetic cinematography and Anne Dudley’s baroque score.
A “meister of porno-noir” is the title Linda Ruth Williams bestows on Paul Verhoeven in her book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. The moniker is rightly earned: in the 1990s, although long familiar with the controversial as a filmmaker in his native country, Verhoeven rose to American auteur fame for his films showcasing sex and eroticism at the centre of the narrative, most notably Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995). The former film stirred a storm of contention and protest from LGBT rights groups upon its release for its portrayal of a bisexual femme fatale, the latter for its extravagant excessive ridiculousness interpreted as sincere bad taste. Now 29 years later, Verhoeven again courts controversy for skewering the Catholic Church, this time from the kooky Christian censorship brigade who protested outside screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival and Lincoln Center. Their ire has had such the opposite effect that people have begun to wonder if they’re on the PR payroll.
Verhoeven was well aware of how polarising his work is when Williams interviewed him for her book in 2005. ‘This total puritanism, this Christian attitude towards sex,’ he says of the film industry at large, ‘the Bush administration, perhaps in reaction to what happened with Clinton, has gone completely the other way. And that drips down to the studios. So there are basically no scripts at the moment that dare to go into sexuality—they’re really difficult to find. And if it’s shown, then it just says, “And they make passionate love.” No descriptions, nothing.’ The man adores an explicit, descriptive sex scene. He remains unfortunately correct in these 16 year old remarks, although the success of his most recent release Elle (2017) would indicate that perhaps the world is more ready for his particular brand of shock. But Journalist Kate Hagen has been rigorously documenting the decline of the cinematic sex scene and the stats are abysmal. Her research reveals that only 1.21% of all films released between 2010 and 2019 contain sex scenes despite weekly Twitter flurries over their supposed prevalence. The decline has only gotten worse: in 2020 and 2021, .007% of all feature films contained sex scenes. And so in the great traditions of moral panics past, an ageing European auteur arrives to free uptight audiences from the tediousness of a romance bereft of sexuality. Verhoeven has combined an overarching political message about puritanism and hypocrisy with a filthy, explicit lesbian love story and American gays starved for eroticism will worship him for it.
Verhoeven has combined an overarching political message about puritanism and hypocrisy with a filthy, explicit lesbian love story and American gays starved for eroticism will worship him for it.
From the moment the stoic Abbess (played by erotic cinema veteran Charlotte Rampling) admonishes Benedetta’s father for ‘haggling like a Jew’ over the scudi price of her stay, we are thrust into the hypocritical and self righteous world of the Renaissance era Catholic Church. The figure of the Jew has long represented an earthy sensuality and a fear of shrewd and discerning intellectualism in the eyes of Western Christianity. The presence of Sister Jacopa (played by the prolific Guilaine Londez), a sickly, dying “converso” that sneeringly announces her greatest sin is her former Judaism, spotlights the boiling fervour of fraud and ignorance frothing behind the convent walls. As a child of World War II, Verhoeven has long been interested in the European fear of the Jewish other, something he explored at length not just in his Nazi espionage drama Black Book (2007), but in Elle as well. The contempt of Jews is one of many mirrored hypocrisies that screenwriters David Birke and Paul Verhoeven deftly weave throughout the tale. Righteous contradictions are frequently doubled here; proclamations of charity are undermined by greed, the maxim “cleanliness is Godliness” refuted by the presence of filth, patriarchal control thwarted by feminine madness at every turn.
As the clergy quibble, the spectre of The Black Plague looms in the form of boils and astrological omens. Contemporary audiences will certainly have much to relate to given the current status of COVID as the dividing virus du jour. It is tempting to scoff with justifiable cynicism at the film and art world’s attempts at compassionately addressing the pandemic. But Verhoeven and producer Saïd Ben Saïd have been working on this project since at least 2017 and it is safe to say that the plague storyline matches real life events is likely a terrifyingly prescient coincidence. Humans are nothing if not predictable beasts, after all, and the puckish meister of porno-noir strikes at our silly loins once again.
I sit down to write this review as the Supreme Court of the United States (the country in which I currently reside) sits poised to uphold a Mississippi law that bars abortion after 15 weeks. The case comes on the heels of Texas blocking access to all abortion services beyond six weeks of pregnancy. These recent developments in body terrorism are indicative of the culmination of a decades-long effort on the part of evangelical conservatives to reverse the landmark decision heralded by Roe v. Wade that legalised abortion nationwide.
Paul Verhoeven has always followed American politics closely and, in the midst of an anti-women and anti-queer culture war fuelled by plague madness, the 83 year old director has given us a gorgeously blasphemous epic about just that very topic. That the real life subject Benedetta (played by a cherubic Virginie Efira) was herself brought into the world through a labour that almost killed both her and her mother is almost too synchronistic with our cultural moment. But though he has been lambasted and praised over the years for his joyously over the top approach, his garishness has never deformed into insusceptibility. The Dutch provocateur is nothing if not consistently “on the pulse” regardless of decade when it comes to sex, censorship, and women’s bodies as commodity. Verhoeven is explicit, but that is not to be mistaken for didacticism.
Paul Verhoeven has always followed American politics closely and, in the midst of an anti-women and anti-queer culture war fuelled by plague madness, the 83 year old director has given us a gorgeously blasphemous epic about just that very topic.
Based on Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Benedetta dramatises the fantastical and erotic events surrounding supposed lesbian nun Benedetta Carlini, who took a Theatine convent by storm in 1613 Tuscany with her manifestation of stigmatic wounds following rapturous visions of Jesus Christ. Verhoeven has sped up the course of events for the sake of titillating brevity, but the core details of the story remain relatively the same as those written down by first hand sources. A fallen Saint Mary statue that inspires spiritual sapphic desire, a mass of nuns self flagellating to the point of blood draw, a carved wooden dildo, nightly trysts full of tribbing, post-reformation torture practices; these salacious details of the story take centre stage in Verhoeven’s version, standing naked in the stark light of Jeanne Lapoirie’s ascetic cinematography and Anne Dudley’s baroque score.
A “meister of porno-noir” is the title Linda Ruth Williams bestows on Paul Verhoeven in her book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. The moniker is rightly earned: in the 1990s, although long familiar with the controversial as a filmmaker in his native country, Verhoeven rose to American auteur fame for his films showcasing sex and eroticism at the centre of the narrative, most notably Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995). The former film stirred a storm of contention and protest from LGBT rights groups upon its release for its portrayal of a bisexual femme fatale, the latter for its extravagant excessive ridiculousness interpreted as sincere bad taste. Now 29 years later, Verhoeven again courts controversy for skewering the Catholic Church, this time from the kooky Christian censorship brigade who protested outside screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival and Lincoln Center. Their ire has had such the opposite effect that people have begun to wonder if they’re on the PR payroll.
Verhoeven was well aware of how polarising his work is when Williams interviewed him for her book in 2005. ‘This total puritanism, this Christian attitude towards sex,’ he says of the film industry at large, ‘the Bush administration, perhaps in reaction to what happened with Clinton, has gone completely the other way. And that drips down to the studios. So there are basically no scripts at the moment that dare to go into sexuality—they’re really difficult to find. And if it’s shown, then it just says, “And they make passionate love.” No descriptions, nothing.’ The man adores an explicit, descriptive sex scene. He remains unfortunately correct in these 16 year old remarks, although the success of his most recent release Elle (2017) would indicate that perhaps the world is more ready for his particular brand of shock. But Journalist Kate Hagen has been rigorously documenting the decline of the cinematic sex scene and the stats are abysmal. Her research reveals that only 1.21% of all films released between 2010 and 2019 contain sex scenes despite weekly Twitter flurries over their supposed prevalence. The decline has only gotten worse: in 2020 and 2021, .007% of all feature films contained sex scenes. And so in the great traditions of moral panics past, an ageing European auteur arrives to free uptight audiences from the tediousness of a romance bereft of sexuality. Verhoeven has combined an overarching political message about puritanism and hypocrisy with a filthy, explicit lesbian love story and American gays starved for eroticism will worship him for it.
Verhoeven has combined an overarching political message about puritanism and hypocrisy with a filthy, explicit lesbian love story and American gays starved for eroticism will worship him for it.
From the moment the stoic Abbess (played by erotic cinema veteran Charlotte Rampling) admonishes Benedetta’s father for ‘haggling like a Jew’ over the scudi price of her stay, we are thrust into the hypocritical and self righteous world of the Renaissance era Catholic Church. The figure of the Jew has long represented an earthy sensuality and a fear of shrewd and discerning intellectualism in the eyes of Western Christianity. The presence of Sister Jacopa (played by the prolific Guilaine Londez), a sickly, dying “converso” that sneeringly announces her greatest sin is her former Judaism, spotlights the boiling fervour of fraud and ignorance frothing behind the convent walls. As a child of World War II, Verhoeven has long been interested in the European fear of the Jewish other, something he explored at length not just in his Nazi espionage drama Black Book (2007), but in Elle as well. The contempt of Jews is one of many mirrored hypocrisies that screenwriters David Birke and Paul Verhoeven deftly weave throughout the tale. Righteous contradictions are frequently doubled here; proclamations of charity are undermined by greed, the maxim “cleanliness is Godliness” refuted by the presence of filth, patriarchal control thwarted by feminine madness at every turn.
As the clergy quibble, the spectre of The Black Plague looms in the form of boils and astrological omens. Contemporary audiences will certainly have much to relate to given the current status of COVID as the dividing virus du jour. It is tempting to scoff with justifiable cynicism at the film and art world’s attempts at compassionately addressing the pandemic. But Verhoeven and producer Saïd Ben Saïd have been working on this project since at least 2017 and it is safe to say that the plague storyline matches real life events is likely a terrifyingly prescient coincidence. Humans are nothing if not predictable beasts, after all, and the puckish meister of porno-noir strikes at our silly loins once again.
