Paul Verhoeven has long loved viciously ambitious blondes – from Renée Soutendijk's saucy hot dog vendor in 1980's Spetters, the final film he made in his native Netherlands, to the masterfully manipulative author played by Sharon Stone in 1992's Basic Instinct, the last in his run of Hollywood-made hits before the almighty stumbling block of Showgirls, in 1995.
Indeed, in an era when the box office is propped up by superheros, it may come as something of a shock to remember that Basic Instinct was one of its year's top money-spinners – thanks in no small part to that deeply scandalous moment involving the crossing and uncrossing of Stone's legs. (And who would've thought then that we were headed towards a culture in which spandex sells better than sex?)
Much as Verhoeven's blondes delight in toying with their admirers, the director delights in toying with his viewers: is Stone's Catherine Tramell a sociopathic killer or an unlucky victim? The wily Dutchman saved the answer for the film's very last shot.
Benedetta, the titular figure of Verhoeven's Sapphic historical drama (played sure-footedly by Virginie Efira – who also appeared in Elle, the director's uncharacteristically subtle last feature), will keep viewers guessing too.
Modelled on the 17th century Catholic nun Benedetta Carlini – via the account of her life proffered in Judith Brown's 1986 non-fiction book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy – Verhoeven's latest inscrutable blonde claims to be gripped by visions from God. (And in the disturbing sequences that depict them, we find that God is big into CGI.)
Some of Benedetta's sisters, however, are none too impressed by her 'holier than thou' schtick.
Foremost among them is the abbess, played by Charlotte Rampling (as hard-nosed here as her Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother in Dune), who suspects that her visions and the accompanying stigmata are not the product of divine – or demonic – intervention but mere fabulations; a means of acquiring power, to the extent that a woman in early modern Tuscany could hope to do so.
Even Benedetta's companion-turned-lover struggles to get a clear read on her: the vivacious Bartolomea (wild-eyed newcomer Daphne Patakia), who bursts into the convent seeking refuge from an abusive father, enthrals Benedetta with her knowledge of worldly cruelty and pleasures, but knows little of the mysterious ways of the Lord.
This novitiate doesn't seem to mind whether or not Benedetta is faking her conversations with Jesus, so long as she isn't faking the orgasms.
Efira brings a maddeningly beneficent countenance to bear as the lead, despite Kim Cattrall-ish features that clash with the 17th-century setting.
A former reality TV host who broke out as a rom-com star, her casting is total Verhoeven in its oddity. (Just ask Elizabeth Berkley, whose hypersexual turn in Showgirls played off her all-American girl persona – the effect too powerful, evidently, for 90s audiences.)
The Belgian actor was chosen on the basis of her work in Elle, in which she played the small but complex role of Isabelle Huppert's pious neighbour, and she successfully carries a sense of warped spirituality over to her latest role.
Her relationship with Bartolomea buds – covertly, of course, by way of stolen glances and straying fingers – in the kind of tacitly sado-masochistic climate Verhoeven feels most at home in.
"You wanted to inflict pain on your sister?" the abbess asks Benedetta after she orders Bartolomea to plunge her hand into boiling water to retrieve some fumbled bobbins of silk. "Do you detest her for some reason?" "No!" Benedetta's response is definitive. A dawning awareness colours the abbess's next, carefully chosen words: "Do you feel affection for her?"
One needs only to think back to one's schoolyard days to understand that certain, unarticulated kinds of affection make themselves felt through strange and violent means.
The cloistered (quite literally) nature of convents – the fact that their denizens are required not so much to repress their sexuality as actively deny it – renders them especially potent sites of latent eroticism. That's what makes Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's simmering 1947 psychodrama Black Narcissus tick as much as Ken Russell's orgiastic 1971 horror The Devils.
"Pain is sensuality," proclaims Urbain Grandier, the Catholic priest at the centre of Russell's Grand Guignol. "Suffering is the only way to know Christ," the local priest tells Benedetta. No wonder the moans that accompany self-flagellation in Verhoeven's film so closely resemble those of carnal embrace.
But Verhoeven doesn't aspire to the febrile pitch of The Devils; his film is too sober in its comportment to slip easily into the habit of 'nunsploitation'.
Yes, there's a wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary that gets put to rather creative (and extremely sacrilegious) use, but it's been 50 years since Vanessa Redgrave did the same thing with a charred bone from a priest's corpse, in Russell's film — and to far greater effect.
For all the sex in Benedetta, none of it feels all that provocative.
While that isn't necessarily a criticism, it's news that may well come as a disappointment to the Verhoeven fans who've been fantasising about something wilder, more gleeful – Nomi Malone in a wimple, perhaps – since the film was first tipped for a berth at Cannes 2019. (Delayed by Verhoeven's hip surgery and then the pandemic, it wouldn't have its premiere until the 2021 edition.)
Crucifix-defiling aside, what Benedetta does share with The Devils (also based on a bubonic plague-ravaged chapter of history) is the desire to show the church through an all-too human lens – that is, to bring politics into focus as well as sex.
It's a grounded approach that mirrors the one pursued by Verhoeven in his 2007 book Jesus of Nazareth, the product of a long-held scholarly interest in Jesus as a historical figure.
Like Russell, Verhoeven knows that the definition of heresy is wont to shift according to the interests of the ruling powers, and that punishment is often meted out for reasons never publicly articulated. It's not God who burns people at the stake, after all, but people. Most of the time, anyway.
Benedetta is in cinemas now.
