Overwhelmingly, Benedetta is fixated on the female body as a site of contradiction and power. Unlike recent additions to the sapphic historical fiction sub-genre – think Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Ammonite (2020) – Benedetta should not be classed as a ‘love story’ per se. Themes of sin, repression, and holy judgement riddle Verhoeven’s film like its characters’ plague symptoms. It fast-forwards to her life as a nun at the age of eighteen, when she develops a relationship with Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), a woman fleeing her abusive father to whom the abbey offers sanctuary. Brown, Benedetta follows the titular character’s (Virginie Efira) arrival at an abbey in Pescia, a town in northern Italy, as a child. Derived from the fairly obscure non-fiction book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (1986) by Judith C. Yet, while Benedetta leaves almost nothing to the imagination, its agenda is no less ambiguous by the end of its two-hour run-time than at the start. The Dutch provocateur’s new film, which debuted to a five-minute standing ovation at Cannes last year, promises an irreverent approach to queerness in the Church it’s a tour-de-force of medieval unpleasantries, kisses in shadowy cloisters, Virgin Mary statues refashioned as sex toys, and headless male ecclesiastics failing to police female desire. As a queer woman raised in the Catholic school system, the premise of Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2022) – a ‘biographical drama’ about a 17th-century lesbian nun affair – immediately hooked me.
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