Film: Benedetta

Arts

FILM HARRY MOUNT BENEDETTA (18)

Hot Lesbian Nuns would have been a rather more accurate name for this film.

With admirable chutzpah, Paul Verhoeven, the 83-year-old director, has applied his sex-and-violence trademark to the tale of a 17th-century nun in Counter-Reformation Italy.

Verhoeven directed RoboCop (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992), the masterly Michael Douglas thriller that propelled Sharon Stone to fame in that leg-crossing scene. Benedetta is, if anything, even more graphic.

It’s based on the true story of Benedetta Carlini (1590-1661), Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God in Pescia, near Florence.

Benedetta was investigated by the Church for her stigmata and her visions of being married to Jesus Christ. Christ allegedly told her the plague would hit Pescia because of the residents’ sins.

All this is covered in the film. But Verhoeven’s real focus is on the lesbian affair Benedetta had with a fellow nun, Sister Bartolomea. The investigation found that they did indeed have an affair – and Benedetta was sacked and jailed. But she was right about one thing – the plague did indeed come to Pescia in 1631.

So if you want to watch lots of topless shots of two gorgeous actresses, Virginie Efira (playing Benedetta) and Daphné Patakia (as Bartolomea), this is the film for you. It’s like a French Carry On film: their habits are forever slipping down to their waists, and Verhoeven’s camera conveniently catches their exposed breasts.

It gets even ruder when Bartolomea takes a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary and fashions it into an object for Benedetta to, um, play with. At this point, the film is essentially soft porn –

17th-century porn: Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) and Benedetta (Virginie Efira) and I certainly wouldn’t advise any devout Christians to watch it.

That said, soft porn was fine when it was injected into a film such as Basic Instinct, with an edge-of-your-seat plot and a brilliant screenplay by Joe Eszterhás.

The plot of Bernadetta is a good one, as well as a grippingly salacious one. Verhoeven plays with the idea of whether Bernadetta inflicted her own stigmata or whether she was the real deal.

The acting by the two principal women is convincing, even when they have to deal with some ludicrous situations that engineer them into naked grapples. Charlotte Rampling pulls off a fine cameo as Soeur Felicita, a previous abbess who doubts Benedetta’s authenticity.

The theme of the plague, too, has chilling modern resonances. Even though Benedetta was filmed before the pandemic – its release has been delayed because of it – the sudden appearance of black lumps on the flesh and the infected fleas that cause them give you the real creeps.

Best of all are the sets, which take advantage of some of the greatest hits of European architecture: Perugia, Montepulciano and several Cistercian abbeys in France. Just point a camera at those old stones and the past springs immediately to life. But Verhoeven’s screenplay – cowritten with David Birke and based on Judith C Brown’s book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (1986) – lets him down. It’s just too stodgy and selfconsciously olden-days. There’s no reason a film set in the 17th century has to have cat-sat-on-themat dialogue – as if everyone born before 1700 spoke only in simple sentences and never said anything funny or clever. You can set a compelling film in the distant past. Just look at The Name of the Rose (1986), set in 1327 in an Italian monastery, with the plot, acting and screenplay as good as anything set in the 21st century. The Blackadder series, the first season apart, showed how you could be funny – and have natural, modern dialogue – in any historical period you like. I hope Paul Verhoeven has another go at an olden-days thriller. He can keep the soft porn if he wants but he must sex up the screenplay, too.