To announce the festival’s triumphant return—and the return of all of cinema—Cannes has brought out the big guns. They’ve got mega-famous movie stars, A-list international directors, and a dildo carved out of a wooden Virgin Mary statue. It wouldn’t be a complete Cannes without one of those.
That implement is one of the humorous centerpieces of madman-genius Paul Verhoeven’s new film Bendetta, a psychosexual Grand Guignol pretending, quite slyly, to be a stately period biopic.
The film is loosely based on the life of Benedetta Carlini, a 17th century nun revered as a mystic and persecuted for engaging in a lesbian affair with another member of her convent. The true story is wild enough, but Verhoeven, bless him, is bound and determined to heighten the riot. Benedetta is a feverish, silly, sometimes tedious swirl of religious mania and dynastic scheming. And, yes, there is sex, staged by Verhoeven as the act that cracks the world open, gazed upon lustily by the old Dutch man behind the camera but not quite exploitatively.
Importantly, the actors involved seem to be having a good time. Virginie Efira, looking like a younger, more wicked Kim Cattrall under a wimple, plays Benedetta as a nervy, elusive antihero. Benedetta claims to have visions of Jesus, to have touched him in corporeal form, and to have been afflicted with stigmata. She’s probably making it all up, but the film leaves room for the possibility that maybe what we’re witnessing is, in fact, the divine making its presence known in Pescia, Italy, as bubonic plague creeps closer. Efira thrills to that ambiguity, pitching both Benedettas—the conniving, power hungry fraud and the true vessel of God—at us at once.
She’s well matched by Daphne Patakia as Bartolomea, an abused farm girl who’s found refuge at the convent and quickly makes moves on Benedetta. Patakia and Efira enjoy a cunning, ravenous rapport; when they actually have sex, it feels like they’ve been doing it the whole time. There is, intriguingly for a Verhoeven film, something almost innocent and sweet about the way they so eagerly hop into bed, as any new couple might once they’ve finally decided to do it.
Benedetta is full of surprising tones shrewdly introduced by Verhoeven, who keeps us leaning forward to suss out just what his film is trying to be and to say. Cloister drama gives way to steamy soft-core romance gives way to camp comedy gives way to apocalyptic horror.
Chasing after Verhoeven is the fun of the film, but it also gets tiring. The film’s cycle of declaration and doubt grows repetitive and Verhoeven’s archness begins to alienate. It’s only in the final act, when an imperious religious official from Florence—played with perfect oil by French film mainstay Lambert Wilson—enters the scene, that the plot breaks into a new and more compelling stride.
It helps immensely that he has a vengeful Charlotte Rampling, as a disgraced abbess, at his side. They hasten the film’s descent—or ascent?—into gruesome chaos. Here Verhoeven gets in his most political points, about venal leaders, corrupted by vanity, bringing their plague to the masses.
Some might argue that Benedetta’s most political dimension is its gleefully transgressive—for the era, anyway—sex. But I think the film is at its most salient when it is depicting, with terror and awe, the doomsday scramble: petty humans brandishing their faith and their imagined might as protection against the creeping end of things. They’re awfully familiar, these would-be prophets and tyrants hawking their exclusive deliverance. Verhoeven laughs at these ruinous fools, and at all those dashing after them.
Not much has changed since Benedetta’s day, has it? I suppose our sex toys don’t threaten to give us quite so many splinters. Thank God, or whoever, for that.
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