BENEDETTA

Anyone cornered by an atheist at a cocktail party knows that militant denial can be just as tedious as blind piety. You don't have to be among the faithful to be bored by films that bash religion. I'm as mindful (and weary) of the centuries-long and still ongoing cruelties and violence inflicted in the name of God. I fear that Hollywood has embraced the same awareness, to the point that filmmakers are allowed to indulge in a form of religion-bashing that makes for uniformly lazy storytelling. Jo Brennan's carefully articulated review of Rose Glass' SAINT MAUD helped me understand why these movies have failed - for the most part, having made the observation that the church is corrupt, or that faith is the habitat of the delusional or the traumatized or the hypocrite, some filmmakers may be left sitting on a smug cushion of "oh did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?" while their movie just stops, having nowhere else to go.

To be sure, Paul Verhoeven casts a whole lot of aspersion on the church in BENEDETTA; particular attention is paid to the tight grip the church makes on finances (the Abbess even makes the blunt point that her convent is not a charity), as well as the naturally human impulses that fly in the face of religious comport, human urges that only intensify under the weight of religious duty. And the thing has willful, even giddy, irreverence all through it, from its basis in the story of a 17th century lesbian nun to the fact that it's, y'know, a movie by Paul Verhoeven (who announces his intent from the start with not one, not two, but three scenes of scatological eruption blasting forth in the first half hour).

But the movie benefits strongly from Verhoeven's masterful touches. The hypocrisy of the church is revealed with a great deal of earthy humor (there is legend-level nun-side-eye in nearly every scene - just because they're devout doesn't mean they lack opinions), and Verhoeven and cast are as uninhibited in delivering Benedetta's visions as they are her sex scenes. There are generous cinematic allusions as well, mainly to Verhoeven's movies (Benedetta's sexuality confounds authority as strongly as Rachel's in BLACK BOOK; oddly, we also get a few nods to ROBOCOP, especially in the first third) but also Hitchcock's (a nun's ascent up a tower leads to an earthly plummet, as in VERTIGO - and what else is the inspired dildo but 2021's best Macguffin?).

But where Verhoeven leaves the wanna-be-blasphemers in the dust is in his earnest appreciation for, and preservation of, the mysteries of faith. The ambiguity is what drives this thing, as are the questions it raises that it is too smart and generous to answer for us. The earnestness with which Benedetta's love for Bartolomea intertwines with her love for Jesus is palpable; like Jesus, she squares the human with the divine in perfect harmony, and the true hypocrisy of the church manifests in its inability to recognize or understand this (indeed, that Benedetta attains her divinity through embracing her pleasure scares THEE SHIT out of the patriarchy, aghast that she, not they, were chosen.) The mystery is preserved right through the final title card of the epilogue, after which Verhoeven's credit tags the thing as loud as a thump on a Bible. The movie is funny, raunchy, downright horny, human, and ambiguous; and only one truly possessed by faith could have made it. Hallelujah, and amen.