At a nunnery in the small Italian village of Pescia, called the Convent of Theatines, a girl named Benedetta (played at the beginning by Elena Plonka) arrives. On the way there, however, her well-to-do parents, Giuliano (David Clavel) and Midea (Clotilde Courau), are bombarded by French “soldiers” (more like land pirates) looking for something of worth to take from the obviously chichi family. When one of the ringleaders snatches Midea’s gold necklace, Benedetta is quick to stand up for what’s theirs and threaten the group with, “The Blessed Virgin will punish you… She does all I ask of her.” It’s at that precise moment that the wind picks up and a bird shits on the eye of one of the men (his good eye, too, as the other is already sealed shut from some previous battle wound). So it is that we’re given our first indication of Benedetta’s—a name meaning “blessed”—mystic tendencies.
And yet, because this is a Paul Verhoeven movie, Benedetta’s predilection for miraculous acts would not be without its underlying and, in the Church’s eyes, contradictory sexual nature. For Benedetta’s increasingly erotic visions are foretold early on during her arrival at the convent, where the Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) refers to what Benedetta’s father is doing by placing her there as “bringing Jesus a new bride.” Benedetta is only too happy to be just that—until she realizes already how many sacrifices of the flesh she’ll have to make. Alas, “Your worst enemy is your body. Best not to feel at home in it,” a nun tells Benedetta as she replaces her secular clothes with an itchy cloth that looks like a potato sack.
Another sign of Benedetta’s inability to resist carnal pleasure (despite being someone who wants to serve as a “conduit” for Jesus) occurs after an incident during which a statue of the Virgin Mary falls on top of her. Naturally, she opts to suckle the exposed breast on this rather erotic rendering of Jesus’ “mother” (nothing more than a conduit herself). When the other nuns encounter the scene, they marvel at how it was a wonder Benedetta wasn’t crushed. The Reverend Mother’s daughter, Christina (played by Héloïse Bresc as a child and then Louise Chevillotte as an adult), then asks, “Could it be a real miracle?” Reverend Mother jadedly replies, “Let’s not have loose talk. Miracles sprout like mushrooms, and usually they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
Verhoeven then flashes us forward to eighteen years later, when Benedetta (now played by Virginie Efira) is portraying the role of the Virgin Mary in a play being put on by the convent. As she’s lifted up by the pulleys designed to show her ascent into heaven, her legs begin shaking uncontrollably. One of the other nuns snaps, “Benedetta, your feet!” When Benedetta’s mother, who was in the audience, later asks her why she was shaking, Benedetta earnestly responds, “I saw Jesus. He came to me. I’m his bride, am I not?” Midea somewhat dismissively assures, “Yes, of course.”
But Jesus, as we all know, is a polyamorist, so maybe that’s why he sends Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) to her, not only to turn the movie into something like Blue is the Warmest Color (also French, just saying) with a religious narrative, but also to prove to Benedetta that devoutness can coexist with…lubricity.
Bartolomea arrives (or “is sent”) in a flurry—like some divine miracle—running in terror from her abusive father and straight into the jurisdiction of the convent. Seeing her distraught state, Benedetta instantly feels an attraction to her, though it’s not yet precisely sexual. Wanting to save her when she sees how sincere she is (or seems) about serving God, she convinces Giuliano, standing nearby, to pay her dowry to the Reverend Mother so that Bartolomea can avoid her own patriarch forever.
But what Bartolomea soon figures out is that the best way to “serve God” is to serve Benedetta sexually, offering her pleasure soon after the ice is broken between them. For Benedetta is the one who helps bathe her once Bartolomea is let into the convent, telling her, “A clean soul demands a clean body.” Yet obviously that’s not true since rich people are the cleanest on the outside with the dirtiest souls on the inside.
Seeing Bartolomea’s nude body only slightly shrouded by the shower curtain, Benedetta runs out of the room, still trying to stifle her sexual urges as that’s what all religious ilk are told to do. And this, too, becomes a crux of Benedetta’s theme: why should religion exclude the “divine” pleasures of sex? Why should piety and pleasure be mutually exclusive? Clearly, there’s no one better to ask these questions than an auteur like Verhoeven, established as he is in the art of portraying carnality and “baseness” onscreen. It’s almost as though a viewer couldn’t ask for a more perfect ironic nod with him as the director of such a film.
As Bartolomea continues to reveal her crassness to Benedetta by asking her where she can shit, Benedetta decides to sit next to her while she does it. Obviously, this sets the tone for confiding in Benedetta about her past, as she mentions, “The plague took my mother last year, so my father made me his wife.” This, in fact, is how Bartolomea responds after Benedetta inquires as to why she has so many bruises and cuts on her legs, ogling them from her post on the other hole in the communal toilette. Bartolomea continues, “I always told him no. He always told me he didn’t give a damn.” She adds, “My brothers did the same behind his back.” “Beauty isn’t always an advantage,” Benedetta offers, indicating right away that that’s her perception of Bartolomea, who herself has never been able to look in a mirror and fully appraise her own appearance.
Christina, who has grown into an increasing narc of a nun, interrupts their moment together and can already sense some fuckery afoot when she catches the two a little too close to one another in the latrine. Right after Christina leaves, Bartolomea seizes the chance to kiss Benedetta on the lips as a show of thanks for that compliment about her being beautiful—and perhaps as an initial recompense for saving her life entirely. Benedetta immediately goes to pray to the Virgin Mary, who replies that surely Benedetta has a “strong enough hand” to guide Bartolomea…a suggestive phrase, to be sure. As it turns out, the next day, Bartolomea’s hand is much stronger as it plunges into Benedetta’s crack while they’re singing in choir. Benedetta’s surprised delight is interrupted by visions of serpents cornering her. Jesus appears to slay them, and, in a moment echoing Sabrina’s (and the rest of the acolytes of the Church of Night) relationship with the Dark Lord in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, she kisses Jesus, for she, like all sisters of the convent, is meant to be his bride. Even though, in most interpretations of that phrase, a decided sexlessness is expected. Yet it is Madonna who once astutely pointed out that “crucifixes are sexy because there’s a naked man on them.” That Jesus also chooses to slay the serpents—emblems of “temptation”—in Benedetta’s vision eventually infers to her that he actually does want her to embrace her erotic fantasies of Bartolomea. But then, the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
These visions of Benedetta’s lead, ostensibly, to the stigmata she receives. Wounds that the Reverend Mother and Christina are extremely skeptical about, while the provost sees it as a welcome opportunity to put Pescia on the map the way Francis did for Assisi. The running thread throughout Benedetta, of course, is to prompt viewers to question the veracity of her miracles (or “miracles”) as much as those around her. Did she really cut herself with glass to inflict the final necessary “crown of thorns wound” or did Jesus do it for her in order to help her assure the convent—nay, the entire world—of her closeness with divinity? This is likely something that depends on both one’s level of religiosity and if that religiosity allows room for the idea that being devout can also include admitting to being a sexual creature with “debauched” thoughts.
The nonce (Lambert Wilson) who eventually comes to see just what the hell is really going on inside this bumfuck-nowhere convent at the behest of the now ex-Reverend Mother isn’t much of a believer in leaving room for “interpretation” about what God or Jesus would want for his followers. So it is that, upon unmasking her “dirty” little affair with Bartolomea (who confesses to all after being subjected to the pear of anguish, a “classic” medieval torture device), the nonce demands, “Jesus must share?” Benedetta unashamedly ripostes, “He joyfully shares everything. With the whole human race… Bartolomea is the particular. Through her I reach universal love.” The nonce snaps back, “Or the universal reaches you through a chunk of wood, is that right?” Ah yes, and let us briefly address this now iconic chunk of wood. The one turned into such when Bartolomea whittles Benedetta’s childhood gift of a Virgin Mary effigy into a half-dildo—in a move that directly contrasts what Magda does to Miranda in Sex and the City. In any event, these could easily be marketed in any sex shop as “the Benedetta.”
Once the “device” has been “crafted,” all limitations are off. As they engage in their usual dance of frottage, Bartolomea sticks the wood in and out of Benedetta as she writhes in sapphic ecstasy. A comet then appears above the convent in a hellfire-like display right after Benedetta orgasms with the makeshift dildo.
This is a vast departure from how Benedetta initially tried to treat her feelings for Bartolomea in the wake of succumbing to her lust in the latrine. For it is soon after that Benedetta turns her desire for Bartolomea into an act of hate by forcing her to stick her hand into scalding hot water that she caused valuable silk bobbins to drop into. In the following days, Benedetta falls inexplicably ill. She’s bound to her bed as she screams endlessly, her urine filled with bile, perhaps a manifestation of the sinfulness she feels mounting or the guilt she feels for needlessly hurting Bartolomea. Maybe, in the end, it’s Jesus’ way of saying she should just give in to the love she wants to display for Bartolomea.
Love that Bartolomea herself has no trouble exhibiting when she comes to visit Benedetta in her sickbed, kissing her on the lips again and saying she wants to be with her. Afterward, a vision of the very same pirate-like soldiers who tried to steal her mother’s necklace at the beginning of the movie shows them attempting to rape Benedetta. The man who saves her this time is not Jesus, but one of the ringleaders of the soldiers—the one with the shoddy eye who Benedetta had Virgin Mary deliver a bird shit to. It could very well be Jesus’ way of saying that all men—except him—are dogs pursuing their own sexual satisfaction, whereas a woman like Bartolomea could tend to Benedetta’s erstwhile sexual naivety more gently.
Another vision of the real Jesus occurs post-pillager aberration, with him appearing to her on the cross and asking her to disrobe. He then tells her to “remove what separates us” a.k.a. his loincloth, revealing that Jesus, in fact, has no dick. It’s a “sort of” vagina meets Ken doll situation. Once more, Jesus’ way of conveying how women make gentler bedfellows? She then places her hands on his against the nails, and subsequently seems to endure stigmata. Seems to being the operative phrase for, as mentioned, believing in Benedetta depends on how much cynicism can outweigh faith.
Sister Jacopa (Guilaine Londez)—still considered ultimately Jewish because of her father’s cut dick—would likely fall under the cynical category, as her final word is, “Lies,” indicating she saw no white light appear, nothing in the great beyond to indicate a life worth devoting to the “good book.” The Reverend Mother—now just Sister Felicita since Benedetta became the abbess—tends to feel the same despite devoting her whole life to Jesus, or rather, the construct.
Benedetta, meanwhile, declares to all that so long as she stays alive, Pescia will remain protected from the ills of the Black Death. And, in another case of reminding us just how evergreen the motif of a plague is, the provost shouts to the nonce when he tries to enter the convent, “The plague must stay outside. Anyone who enters must be examined by our doctors.” How very China-esque. But of course the nonce barrels right through despite being a bubonic carrier.
At the trial, Benedetta sits serenely before her “judges” as Sister Felicita “politely” describes what happened with the dildo as: “penetrat[ing] the sex of Benedetta and bring[ing] her to crisis.” That’s one way of putting “the little death” out of business as a phrase. The nonce decrees, “Crimen nefastum” (wicked deed) in response. It doesn’t take long for Bartolomea to betray Benedetta and freely confess to that wicked deed (or one of many) with too much time spent in the torture chamber—a place that quickly eradicates any romanticization of the notion of dying for love.
Yet things are not over for Benedetta despite her condemnation to be burned at the stake. She continues to surprise her audience with more divine displays of the stigmata (but once again, there is some small telltale sign to cast doubt on Benedetta’s authenticity), paired with the “possession” of her body by “Christ,” prompting her to speak in a quite demonic tone. And yes, in the real-life story, Benedetta claimed it was the angel Splenditello who possessed her while she committed her carnal acts with Bartolomea.
Invariably, the love affair turns sour with Bartolomea’s betrayal. Though, luckily, Benedetta is all too ready to offer Christ-like forgiveness, calmly telling Bartolomea as she’s brought to the stake, “It’s fine. I had to be betrayed.” As though this is all part of her own adherence to a paint-by-numbers narrative of how to become a martyr. Though not a saint, as Benedetta was never granted that level of respect. There was too much dubiousness about her “case,” not to mention how mired in the scandal of lesbianism it was. Indeed, the Church would have preferred to bury her story altogether. It was one thing to let on that two priests could enjoy each other’s company (or that of little boys), but two nuns?—two women?—that doesn’t fit so well into the misogynistic lens of Catholicism.
And while the nonce can make reference to knowing the touch of a prostitute, a woman “of the cloth” is not permitted the same “sins” of sexual awakening. Talking of whores, not only was Jesus fond of them, but one of the nuns at the convent who used to perform said role tells Bartolomea as she’s cast back out into the town, “One thing I learned as a prostitute: humiliation doesn’t leave a mark.” Benedetta, as a film, however, certainly does. And no matter what one’s religious affiliation (or lack thereof), it’s a Verhoeven-ified biopic that isn’t easily forgotten.
