“Benedetta”, Paul Verhoeven in his diabolical convent

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Just as a manner of critical flirtatiousness attenuates the silliness of certain films, there is an inclination to stupefy works which bring into play the complexity of human things. Reduced to the violence and sex that nourish his work, Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls, She…) Sometimes pay the price. Loving, it is true, to play with fire, he never stops working to make us smarter, inviting us – including from Hollywood where he led sedition to the end of what was possible – not to wait cinema than ready-made answers and Pavlovian emotions.

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New proof with this wonderful film – playful, inspired, provocative – that Benedetta. Produced by Saïd Ben Saïd who continues, after It (2016), a sparkling collaboration with the director, linking it to the French production, the film is adapted from the book Sister Benedetta, between saint and lesbian (Gallimard, 1987) by the American historian Judith C. Brown, specialist in the Italian Renaissance and the history of sexuality, who brought to light the extremely rare minutes of the trial in sapphism of a nun and related the circumstances in this work.

The action therefore takes place in Pescia, Tuscany, in the XVIIe century, for the most part in a convent. Entrusted to the care of the Mother Superior (Charlotte Rampling) at the age of 9, the young Benedetta Carlini, already known for her supraterrestrial visions, becomes there a beautiful young woman (Virginie Efira), simultaneous prey of a conjugal possession by her lord Jesus Christ and a sexual debauchery that leads her to cultivate a devouring relationship with a young sister.

In view of the miracles she accomplishes, Benedetta soon supplants the abbess – a nun entirely subject to the political hierarchy of the Church – who, spurred on by her daughter Christina (Louise Chevillotte), has always suspected her of being a simulacrum. While Benedetta multiplies the visible signs of her Christlike election and secretly lives with her lover moments of high intensity carnal exultation, a terrible epidemic of plague ravages Tuscany.

See as well : Paul Verhoeven, flesh and blood

The nuncio (Lambert Wilson, mercilessly torn from the grace of the film men and gods (2010), of Xavier Beauvois), to be cautious armed with the omnipotence of the Church as a constituted body, which intends to convince her of simulacrum and Sapphism and, failing to obtain her confessions and her contrition, to make her burn alive. Affected by the disease, he only brings bubonic contamination and maceration of the spirit and the flesh in a city hitherto safe and sound, because confined by Benedetta on the orders of his Lord.

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