To announce the festival’s triumphant return—and the return of all of cinema—Cannes has brought out the big guns.
The film is loosely based on the life of Benedetta Carlini, a 17th century nun revered as a mystic and persecuted for engaging in a lesbian affair with another member of her convent.
She’s probably making it all up, but the film leaves room for the possibility that maybe what we’re witnessing is, in fact, the divine making its presence known in Pescia, Italy, as bubonic plague creeps closer.
There is, intriguingly for a Verhoeven film, something almost innocent and sweet about the way they so eagerly hop into bed, as any new couple might once they’ve finally decided to do it.
Benedetta is full of surprising tones shrewdly introduced by Verhoeven, who keeps us leaning forward to suss out just what his film is trying to be and to say.
It’s only in the final act, when an imperious religious official from Florence—played with perfect oil by French film mainstay Lambert Wilson—enters the scene, that the plot breaks into a new and more compelling stride.
Here Verhoeven gets in his most political points, about venal leaders, corrupted by vanity, bringing their plague to the masses.
But I think the film is at its most salient when it is depicting, with terror and awe, the doomsday scramble: petty humans brandishing their faith and their imagined might as protection against the creeping end of things.
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