F.There are two options for films set in bygone worlds: Either you take the matter completely seriously, or you leave all seriousness aside. This applies to directors and viewers alike: they make a silent pact to make the game work. In this respect, watching costume films is something of an act of faith. You experience the wonder of time travel, or you enjoy the bluff. It only gets bad if the film is somewhere in between, if it is neither consistent in reconstructing nor in bluffing. Then one sees neither the completely different of the past nor a playful idea of it. Instead, you step into a theme park that disguises itself as a natural backdrop. At first glance, the things and people in it appear real. On closer inspection, they are made of plastic.
The Dutch director Paul Verhoeven made a film based on the life of the nun Benedetta Carlini. Carlini lived in the small town of Pescia near Florence in the early seventeenth century. She spent the last thirty-five years of her life in solitary confinement. She was condemned because church leaders believed her visions, in which she received instructions from Christ, to be inspired by the devil. The investigations dragged on for six years. In the end, the testimony of a fellow sister named Bartolomea tipped the scales, who reported that Benedetta lay down on her at night and satisfied herself with her. The clerics, for whom lesbian love was inconceivable, also attributed this behavior to the machinations of hell.
Verhoeven’s “Benedetta” begins with an outdoor scene. On the way to the monastery of Pescia, the convoy with the future novice is attacked by a band of robbers. Benedetta, kneeling in front of a picture of Mary, prays to the Madonna to send help. A bird flies by and drops its droppings on one of the robbers. You understand the hint and pull away. Then you see Benedetta’s entry into the convent being negotiated. The abbess, played with fragile dignity by Charlotte Rampling, demands a hundred and fifty gold scudi, the girl’s father only wants to pay a hundred. He shouldn’t haggle like a Jew, the abbess rebukes him, and he gives in.
The two triumphs of female persistence over male dominance are a dramaturgical promise. The film, it seems, wants to explore the women’s cosmos of the monastery in a completely new way. In the following scenes you can see how a theorbo is played, how silk threads are spun and how the bookkeeping works. A statue of the Virgin falls over and buries Benedetta under herself. She survived, but there is still no talk of a miracle. But then, after a leap in time, Benedetta’s visions set in. It is the moment when the film flips from the outside to the inside perspective of its heroine. And it’s the moment when Paul Verhoeven does what he does best: action cinema. Venomous snakes crawl up Benedetta’s body and Jesus cuts off their heads. A knight tries to rape Benedetta, but Jesus kills him. It seems as if Verhoeven copied these scenes from another film. It is therefore also the moment when the film betrays its heroine.
A Jesus with a female pubic triangle
The tragedy of Benedetta Carlini’s story lies in the fact that she believed in her dream story. Verhoeven, on the other hand, does not believe in it for a second, for him there is only the reality of desire. That is why he stages the encounter between Benedetta (Virginie Efira) and Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) as a lesbian love story and the visions as their symbolic processing. The climax of this overwrite is an apparition of the crucified, who asks Benedetta to lie on him. The camera slides down on his body and sees a female pubic triangle.
In a film that is serious about the power of the unconscious, this blasphemy would be a permanent image. Here it sizzles, because Verhoeven is not interested in the emotional world of his heroine, from which it comes. For him, too, love is primarily a process, an act for which statuettes of the Virgin Mary are turned into dildos and hidden in missiles, and when Benedetta receives her stigmata, he lays the shards with which she has pierced her hands and feet, like this clearly like a surgeon’s instruments. This rabid superficiality is a basic feature of Verhoeven’s cinema, but in his better films he has found leading actresses who contrast his voyeur gaze with the intensity of their play. Most recently, in “Elle”, it was Isabelle Huppert. The Belgian Virginie Efira, who walks through “Benedetta” like a late Hitchcock blonde, lacks the stature for it.
So the heart of this film stands still before the story really gets going. And it doesn’t start to beat when Verhoeven unwinds the full program of the sword-and-cowl genre: a nun falling from the roof of the church; the plague that comes to Pescia with a corrupt nuncio (Lambert Wilson); a failed witch burning that leads to a popular uprising. Almost forty years ago Verhoeven told something very similar – just not as a sour monastery drama, but as a colorful historical carnival. At the time it was about a mercenary in Renaissance Italy, but monks, witches, blondes and the plague were also involved. The film was called “Flesh and Blood”. Flesh and blood: that’s all “Benedetta” is missing.
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