Benedetta’s gravitational center is a wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary, which is plucked from the hands of a faithful girl, stashed in a dark drawer, only for it to turn, many years later, into a sex toy and a final stop on her way to the funeral pyre. Someone had to tell this story garnished with visionary voluptuousness and infantile transgressions, and that certain someone was Paul Verhoeven. Speaking of which: is there any living creator nowadays who is more gifted at depicting contradicting emotions that are constantly just about to slip into masochism, terror, or vulgarity, than this eighty-year-old revenant that is experiencing a full artistic swing? In Benedetta, Verhoeven goes for another round on the territory of climaxes, after the entanglement of senses and fluids that he plotted in Elle (2016), surprising in his sudden accelerations, using old patterns whose shine he restores and small attentions meant for an audience that is feverish, and worthy of a champion that is in full control of his means. The result? This directorial pirouette in which two women – the plumpy Virginie Efira and the ghastly Daphne Patakia – mutually seduce each other towards the extremities of the soul, and in between their bodies, a je ne sais quoi that speaks volumes in terms of abandon, magnitude, and fabulous shamelessness is born.

As is usually the case with Verhoeven, there are two ways in which one could summarize the film: one is the story itself, regarding a series of homoerotic shenanigans happening at the very heart of the Church, which quickly ends up scandalizing the entire clergy; the other, just as reasonable, is the story of all the false tracks which this unbuttoned script (written together with David Birke and based on a book by Judith Brown) leads us into. It should then be of no wonder that Benedetta is neither a film about the power of faith (as that introductory scene with a small girl taking the straight path to sainthood would have suggested) nor is it one about the pitfalls of lust (in the vein of Bernanos-Pialat’s Sous le Soleil de Satan). Indeed, Benedetta (Efira), an all-too-pious nun living in a convent, one day wakes up to find Jesus’ stigmata on her body – deep wounds cutting into her flesh -, yet it is unclear whether she was truly visited by the Messiah at the tips of her feet, or if she simply got cut by a shard of glass. It’s also true that Sister Bartolomea, with her hypnotic thinness, sticks her sharp and devilish nose into the quaint world order, but, in the end, what is wrong with doing so, if all is emptiness? Here, Verhoeven sets a paperboard world into motion, an extremely interesting one, not due to its spiritual amplitudes, which are successively ridiculed one-by-one, but for the laboratory-like mechanisms onto which it rests its entire weight. Like Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, in which the courtroom is replaced with a dank sacristy, while still functioning on the same principle: of running wild while holding the reins of fiction, pulling them beyond the final frontier. Serenely heretical up until the very end, Verhoeven desecrates everything, throwing the cold shadow of doubt over the handful of lowly people who throw grandiose words and endlessly agonize. And in the hold of this shadow, which is capable of compromising any gesture of purity, it’s every man for himself.

What I like about Benedetta is the fact that it managed to create an incendiary, and nowadays all-too-rare dosage between small (all sorts of startling episodes which stick your head into the pestilential intimism of flesh) and grand (a brutal zoom out just as you least expect it, up to the scale of millennial history), a sign that jittery anxiousness and rarefied intellectualism are still capable of shaking hands. Just look at the scenes in which the jealous Sister Felicita (performed by the imperial Charlotte Rampling), recently deposed of her throne by Benedetta herself, rides a carriage down to Florence to rat her out, leaving behind her the epic spectacle of a landscape infested by the plague, with bodies burning in the street and ironclad doctors donning metal masks: lying somewhere in between Hieronymus Bosch and Assasin’s Creed, the film rides down an exhilarating and slippery slope, in which wonders have the air of a tasteless joke, and divine grace gets tripped up during post-production.

To briefly recap: in these puritanical times, a film that is relentless in the name of an absolutist view of the pleasures of the senses and that, on top of it all, manages to find a moral of corporeality is good news for cinema. The fact that it’s coming from a veteran that fully understands the need for electrified and cheeky films is all the more telling. Benedetta puts drama back into its place of honor – the film’s only “honorable” element -, but for that, it must make a detour all the way down to the most luminous and yet darkest times that man has ever known, when everything could be freely represented. What a terrifying scene is the one in which Sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte: Verhoeven’s inspiration to throw a Garrelian actress into a sea of rotten souls) throws herself from the roof of the basilica amid an apocalyptic night, against a blood-red sky. One might be tempted to believe that she is the only nun that refused to live in a circle of lies and blind obedience, but her truth is just as partial, her audacity just as contaminated by pride as the others’. Already, by this point, our foundations as spectators are starting to shake. What can we say – what random, fictitious saint can we still hang on to – when we can fully grasp the gleam of a flawless evil in the eyes of Benedetta, or when we hear that monstrous wail that invades her at times as if it were spinning forth from the most horrendous of nightmares? It might well be that this is one of the freest and fervent films of the year, which drips – that is: rains down at full throttle – blasphemy onto piety, and venom onto love, only for it to savor the effects of its perversions from the sidelines.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.