“Benedetta” (R) *** and a half

WITH this film, writer (in conjunction with David Birke) and director Paul Verhoeven journeys to a theme seldom ventured on any kind of moving/talking media.

The literary foundation for this 17th century drama is the book “Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy” by Judith C Brown, published in 1986 (remember this date and read on to learn why it is important in the film’s context). That title on its own says much. 

In the Italian city of Pescia, pre-pubescent child Benedetta is abandoned by her mother into the care of the nuns in the convent managed by mother superior Sister Felicita (Charlotte Rampling). Quick jump 18 years to where the child has become a woman (Virginie Efira), noted for her devotion to Jesus and gifted with an ability to see His role in most of the inexplicable events in the community and the town.

Entering the convent and Benedetta’s life comes abused, uneducated farm girl Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia). Sister Felicita gives Bartolomea into Benedetta’s care. And the film sets forth toward its real objective.

If you are a devout Christian reader you need to know what happens next before deciding whether you want to see this film. 

Very little has been published about what happens after lights out in convents. Paul Verhoeven is about to deliver his vision of what Judith Brown has told about it. I have not read that book. But, by golly, I’ve seen its movie.

Even before Benedetta and Bartolomea become full-tilt sexual lovers (and why might young women with no other means of assuaging their hormones not succumb to what nature has given them?), the film “Benedetta” has begun to engage the filmgoer’s inner sense of foreboding. Not for what is on the screen but because of the modern values that still control it. 

Two very handsome young women not only appear unabashedly, full-frontally nude; they also do what women of that sensory persuasion do to get the natural buzz that it brings. Good on them, I say. 

Not so the Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson) who arrives in Pescia with his retinue to go through a quasi-legal, quasi-clerical judgement and deliver the punishment that he has made up his mind Benedetta is going to get. Tied to a stake in the middle of a pile of oil-soaked firewood.

At this point, the film’s tensions have become powerful and close to unbearable. I won’t tell you how they result. But fate, or was it God, stepped in. Death was indeed on its way to Italy. They called it the plague, as indeed it was. They had no weapon with which to fight it. But Pescia’s townsfolk closed the city’s gates to it. And nobody in the city died from it.

If that doesn’t look like what’s been happening in our present decade, the coincidence is remarkable. Should we see in it another of Benedetta’s visions? Who knows? But after seeing the film and all the directorial indulgences in its 131 minutes, I came away less deeply impressed by its nude flesh than by its canonical and juridical passages.

At Dendy and Palace Electric