For a movie in which an adult nun’s childhood statuette of the Virgin Mary is carved into a dildo and then used on her, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta is surprisingly unsurprising.
After rising to fame in the Netherlands, the director conquered American cinema by bringing both devil-may-care vigor and a European sense of irony to the types of films that in another timeline might have been standard-issue studio sleaze, sex thrillers and sci-fi shoot-’em-ups.
Or is it the other way around? Her first night there, as she prays to a large statue of the Virgin Mary, the statue collapses on her; Benedetta, finding herself face-to-face with the fallen Virgin’s bare breast, starts to suck on it.
The earthy, early scenes of Benedetta and Bartolomea’s relationship are probably the film’s high point, with the wide-eyed Patakia bringing a hungry, animalistic energy to her interactions with the reserved, angel-faced Efira, whose Benedetta finds in herself both the urge to embrace and punish this woman.
Was she really talking to Jesus? Was she really experiencing stigmata, or was it all a ruse staged with a well-concealed shard of glass? And what about that booming, authoritative voice she adopts in her reveries? Was she a seer or a charlatan? By actually showing us her early visions of Christ, Verhoeven seems at first to accept Benedetta’s divinity at face value.
Especially since he also clearly intends to shock us, and it’s harder to shock us with a story like this once it starts to slip into something closer to the slick vernacular of modern-day erotica.
So don’t be surprised if we wind up arguing for years over whether the increasingly chaotic nature of Benedetta is a mistake or exactly what its auteur intended.