Sweetest Devotion: Paul Verhoeven's "Benedetta"

“Jesus’ companions must have heard him snore, snuffle, and fart. If I were to make a film about Jesus, these everyday aspects would resonate in the background.”

– Paul Verhoeven, Jesus of Nazareth

Benedetta feels of a piece with every Verhoeven movie to this point, including his yet-(never?)-to-be-made Jesus flick which sought to demystify “the historical Jesus” as a human being. Benedetta’s steamy romance between two misbehaving nuns is presented as nonchalantly and frankly as the central relationship in his first feature, Turkish Delight. It has the same sensationalism and kid-with-a-slingshot attitude as his Hollywood work. Its modern style is probably closest to Elle—and was largely made with the same team—though it is less burdened by the stylistic and tonal conventions of contemporary French cinema which provided fertile but perhaps less extensive grounds for Verhoeven to play with and against than those of Hollywood. Alongside Black Book, it provides a window into what kind of work a career of the director’s own design might have consistently produced had he not made the move to the mainstream. In this way, in terms of passages of his filmography, it may be closest to the Dutch films he cut his teeth on in just how natural and relaxed it feels. Lastly and obviously, the film it overlaps with the most, at least in terms of content, is his underrated first english language feature, Flesh + Blood, which also portrays hero worship and mob mentality in medieval times and similarly involves the plague as a plot device. Ultimately, Benedetta asks the same fundamental questions or points to the same fundamental things that all his films do about human nature.

“The human being is bad,” says Paul Verhoeven, but this statement is not as misanthropic nor nihilistic as it may at first sound. It is more about how morality is one of the less natural aspects of humanity. It is something that emerges historically and socially. This is what makes religion so fascinating for Verhoeven. It is an imposition of an organized system of morality and ethics—or at least is veiled as such—onto the immoral human being. This is made abundantly clear in Benedetta in which characters live their lives according to a devotion to the divine, but only in so far as social conventions so beckon them. It is a kind of costuming on top of who they really are, both individually and collectively (and the putting on and removal of costuming figures importantly here). What does emerge here as an essential human quality is the hunger for power that Verhoeven does see as driving all human beings, whether it’s a showgirl spilling beads onto a stage to sabotage a competitor or a nun seeking to displace the Reverend Mother who oppresses her to be the top dog of a convent. Whether it’s closer to center stage or closer to God: it’s all about the spotlight, baby.

Benedetta is struck with visions of a hunky Jesus who prizes her, saves her, and even asks her to undress. Verhoeven, as he is wont to do, has his cake and eats it too by rendering these visions as kitschy camp while also emphasizing the seriousness of their resonance with Benedetta. A master of distancing himself from the perspectives of his characters while fully realizing them, Verhoeven’s detachment from his characters’ worldviews is hardly a lack of investment in them. (Verhoeven is a master of showing us how his characters think, feel, and imagine the world around them, they are in part its makers and sometimes said world seeks to exile them, whether a corporatized, militarized Detroit, a dog-eat-dog Las Vegas, or the inherently structured oppressiveness of a convent). Resultantly, Benedetta’s visions are contextualized neither as real nor as laughable delusions. For Verhoeven these are plausible, explainable phenomenological happenings that he seeks to contextualize and in so doing illustrates how the particular belief system and cultural placement of an individual shapes how they relate to and perceive the world. This is something which someone living in this time, brought up in the way Benedetta is, as someone who from a young age believe herself to be close to God and is raised in a convent, may experience and sincerely believe. However, Verhoeven also wishes to illustrate how someone may take advantage of the prevailing belief system of those around them, even when they themselves are invested in it. If there’s profit to be had, be it monetary or social, it takes precedence over all else. A blunt and sly subversion of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Benedetta is contrastively impure. The titular would-be martyr with a direct line to The Powers That Be is a horny, clever, ambitious woman who may very well believe Jesus is on her side but has no problem with how that may benefit her and be to the detriment of those around her. This great invention of God’s light inspires jockeying for position like any other spotlight and we are indifferent to the fate of others if it does not concern our own.

We are first introduced to Benedetta as a child when she and her family are ambushed by a group of nefarious men on horseback. The young girl is able to stave off the potential threat by “conjuring” God’s will in the form of seeming to beckon a bird to shit on one of the bandits. This divine intervention (coincidence) helps her learn quickly what carries power. Verhoeven sees this human cleverness in a historical way but it can fitted to any moment: people who discover what people believe and how it can be used against them ultimately discover one of the most valuable weapons which can be yielded against even those who are in greater positions of power. Those same people may even themselves believe in the same manipulative ideological forces of which they take advantage. That the film arrives after several years of reckoning amidst cancel culture where the lines between righteous empowerment and Machiavellian opportunism are irrevocably blurred makes it especially pointed but this is not the film’s sole aim. Verhoeven is as always interested more in what transcends a given moment and instead in what qualities and potential wickedness underlies the human being at large and here in particular how people are at the mercy of their prevailing belief systems.

We are introduced to the convent that will become Benedetta’s home for the rest of her upbringing via Charlotte Rampling’s Reverend Mother—superb here in an interestingly subdued humanized role that could have been played up towards divergent extremes of bitch or saint and is poignantly grounded and human—as she barters with Benedetta’s family to have her taken into the fold. It is the bottom dollar that motivates even this seemingly holy figure who sees herself as a chess player when she is in fact a pawn just like anyone else.

Jesus appearing as the muse of wet dreams says a great deal about what life and civilization after Christ was to become, and the frankness with which these characters are detailed tells us just as much about who Jesus may have been—we may not yet have Verhoeven’s Jesus movie but even this peripheral and implicit portrayal articulates how he may have been a remarkable person who lived and not a benevolent resurrected spirit who absolves all—a figure clung to by the desires of a people seeking to be more than they are. Verhoeven has less to say about the church and religion in themselves, as well as faith itself which is, again, a historical phenomenon to him, and more about how any institution is beholden to the same fallacies of mankind and the power structures they construct. Benedetta’s sexuality is channelled towards the only figure she is taught to believe is pure and holy, a leap from the wrinkled men and women of the cloth with whom she is surrounded. That is until a nubile new arrival—Bartolomea, played by Daphne Patakia—enters the convent who naturally becomes the object of her repressed desires. Their ensuing relationship seems less like a romance than it does an extended sexual conquest for Benedetta.

As blunt, comic, and broad as Verhoevens style can seem, what drives him is, in a sense, realism. He is cinema’s mischievous realist. Verhoeven wants to construct a context within which human beings behave how they actually behave. It turns out he is a historian after all. If we stretch such definitions then what distinguishes a Haneke from a Verhoeven? Haneke is interested in similar things but his methodology is more specific and yet more removed from an in-the-dirt perspective. Verhoeven doesn’t judge, he beholds. When he says the human being is bad, he does not exclude himself.

In the end, in any context, it comes down to power, sex, and ideology. The characters in Starship Troopers are hijacked by imperialist propaganda. They believe in what they are told to believe because human beings seek something outside the self. Shitting, farting, fucking, eating - Verhoeven’s humans are fundamentally the same, distinguished only by status and appearance and whatever belief system it is to which they have subscribed. The Hollow Man rapes because he will not be identified as a rapist. He can get away with it and knows it. So too do men of power who can take advantage of it. But just the same a woman is capable of taking advantage of her position. Verhoeven is not just a mischievous realist but a mischievous feminist. His feminism comes from believing women are just as capable of Machiavellian pursuits as men, just as clever, just as powerful. For all that might be subversive about Benedetta, it lacks the Trojan Horse pleasure of his Hollywood films which feel like they get away with murder. In spite of the overt transgressions of Elle and Benedetta, their festival-arthouse origins and trajectories ultimately make them feel safer.

Nevertheless, Verhoeven is one of our most honest filmmakers whose perceived provocations come from a commitment to what he understands to be accurate and, importantly, compelling. One of the sharpest directions in Benedetta is to provide all of the evidence of her manipulations without compromising the portrayal of her faith—these things are not mutually exclusive which leaves us with a much messier idea of human behaviour, and between right and wrong. Especially when it leads to the supplanting of a patriarchal abuser of power willingly inflicting harm on those around him. And then, in a sort of sleight of hand, it is in another character altogether, whose relationship to their faith is rendered beautifully human in its competing devotion and skepticism, that we find a true act of martyrdom towards the film’s closing moments.

As for the verdict on Benedetta herself, the character’s slyness earns a sort of respect from Verhoeven (who similarly admired Sharon Stone’s Catherine in Basic Instinct). He understands and is fascinated by morality but clearly isn’t a moralist himself and much of what makes Verhoeven’s cinema interesting lies in that gap—and is especially welcomed today amidst a landscape of navel-gazing and self-censorship. Amen.