Benedetta (2021) Whatever you think of this movie, which veers from artistic seriousness to 1970's 42nd St. 'Nunsploitation', this much can't be denied......
Paul Verhoeven is back, baby!
And the director provocateur of 'Robocop', 'Total Recall', 'Basic Instinct' and 'Starship Troopers' once again pushes the sex 'n violence envelope.......even when making a film set entirely in a 17th century Italian nunnery.
Not that the setting stops him from serving up a banquet of forbidden lesbian sex, brutal physical abuse, blood-soaked religious symbolism, near psychotic Catholic repression, supernatural possession, whippings, stake-burnings, limb-loppings, naked nuns wielding dildos, Jesus Christ.......and the plague! (Complete with pus-filled, infectious body lesions....)
And all of this delirious Medieval madness taken from a true story? What's not to love?
While the skill and style poured into this handsomely photographed French language spectacle implies it aspires to higher purposes, we can't blame anyone who watches it with a tub of buttered popcorn in their hand, taking it in as a guilt-free grindhouse wallow.
This film had us a hello as soon as we laid eyes on the lead actress in the title role, Virginie Efira......whom we fell head over heels for in the odd little French romcom "Up For Love" (see our post of 8/2/21...)
The statuesque, stunning Efira plays Benedetta, who as an overly pious child, is sold by her father to a convent's Abbess (Charlotte Rampling) for a lifetime as a 'Bride of Christ' nun. The now grown Benedetta really does have the hots for J.C., regularly caught in the throes of Paul Verhoeven-like visions that look like outtakes from "Robo-Jesus'.
She further sends the Abbess and the Catholic hierarchy into a tizzy when her lifelike dreams afflict her with stigmata crucifixion wounds and have her growling in an angry demonic-like voice. If that isn't enough to stir the film's already boiling pot, there's the arrival at the convent of the desperate young Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), fleeing physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her entire family.
As anyone who's ever encountered a nunsploitation movie, it doesn't take long for Benedetta and Bartolomea to strip down and do the humpa-humpa......deploying a whittled down wooden Virgin Mary as a......well, need we go on?
All of this blasphemous sexual and religious frenzy doesn't sit well with the neighborhood Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson) who shows up to go full Torquemada on Benedetta's unfortunate ass...and just in time for the Bubonic Plague to start super-spreadin' everywhere.....(Here's where "Benedetta" starts to closely resemble Verhoeven's other grandly gross Medieval epic, his 1985 "Flesh + Blood" with Rutger Hauer)
This all leads up the the film's riotous final act where the director finally unleashes the demented Verhoevian climax you knew was on its way sooner or later. And he delivers it right on time.
We return now to the question we posed in the title of this post. Should we treat any of Verhoeven's trademarked hysterical hoo-hah as if it's genuine film festival cinematic art or is it a 'Nuns In Heat' grindhouse bottom-dweller all dolled up to look like a respected, classy drama?
You decide. Like all of this director's films, we suggest it's a mixture of both - high art for the culture vultures and blood and babes for the rest of us. . And that's why audiences and critics alike find his work riveting, regardless of whether we find fascinating, thrilling or grossly repulsive..
For us, that makes the film something of a 3 & 1/2 star (***1/2 achievement. Whatever it's supposed to be, we know we couldn't look away......and we suspect, neither will you.
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