Well it isn’t a party until Paul Verhoeven says it is. The 82-year-old Dutch legend returns to the Croisette following his hugely successful, Oscar-nominated ELLE with a dark tale of faith, sex, truth and intrigue that proves yet again it is quite simply impossible for Paul Verhoeven to make an un-entertaining movie. BENEDETTA walks a fine line between farce and high drama, taking on heavy subject matters with a naughty wink, it’s a riot from start to finish.
Set in the 17th century, the film introduces us to the titular heroine when she’s a little girl, being sent to live at a convent in the Italian town of Pescia. Rather untypically for a child, Benedetta shows no fear or sadness to part with her parents. If anything, she looks elated to finally be dedicating herself to her calling – being the bride of Jesus. As she grows into a young woman (played by Virginie Efira), Benedetta’s obsession with marrying the man on the cross gets more and more intense. She has graphic dreams in which those who stand between her and her designated Husband get killed violently.
One day, an abused girl named Bartolomea flees from her tormenter to join the convent and is assigned to the care of Benedetta. A curiosity between the two women quickly turns into attraction and before you know it, they’re getting creative with a handy Virgin Mary statue. MEANWHILE, Benedetta’s fantasy dates with the Savior gets biblical as she she’s found with stigmata wounds suggesting martyrdom. Despite her protests and suspicions, the reigning Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) heading the convent is replaced by Benedetta following the miracle. But the drama only begins when some of the sisters start to question Benedetta’s self-proclaimed gift, the disgraced Reverend Mother seeks the support of church officials for revenge, and a deadly plague threatens to sweep Pescia.
I don’t know why I still go in a Verhoeven thinking it might be trash (the guy who did BASIC INSTINCT and ROBOCOP knows a thing or two about making movies!), but he really does go out of his way to find the most over-the-top material. I mean, a medieval costume drama about lesbian nuns prominently featuring the Virgin Mary as a dildo? How does this NOT become a total parody and just implode under its own silliness? And yet somehow Verhoeven manages to keep the dramatic core of the film intact on top of the brazen tongue-in-cheek humor. The level of control and tonal fine-tuning required is mind-blowing.
For all its craziness, BENEDETTA is ultimately a film about truth – whether perceived, manipulated or divined. We never learn definitively if Benedetta was indeed miraculously stigmatized or inflicted the wounds herself. A church tribunal with an agenda reaches its conclusion by resorting to inhumane means. Benedetta’s equals and even her lover have their opinions, some of them must pay a terrible price for it. And perhaps most interesting of all is her own view of the matter. Is she really a vessel for divinity and here to protect believers from the plague? Or is she a power-hungry, pathological liar who’s been hatching her plan since childhood? Or is she something in between, someone so caught up in a belief system they can no longer tell what’s in their head?
The film asks compelling questions and keeps you guessing ‘til the very end. Efira does a fantastic job maintaining the protagonist’s inscrutable façade. She’s entirely relaxed in a role that’s exposed in every way, yet you are never quite sure what goes on underneath that serene, supremely assured expression. Rampling is terrific, too. Playing a character that’s ruthlessly scheming, bitter and jealous, she brings conviction, dignity, and never allows the portrayal to get cartoonish. In a late scene where the two nemeses meet for a last exchange, the actresses beautifully communicate the shift in their power dynamics and further feed the mystery with a tantalizingly whispered message. An effective, dramatically charged moment.
I don’t think Paul is coming for the Palme this year (although that would be hilarious), but it’s so wonderful to see a master filmmaker do what he does best. BENEDETTA is ridiculously fun but never feels unserious or less than expertly crafted. Production and costume design are both ace. The editing captures the interchanging comedic and dramatic beats and gives the film its steady pulse. All in all, this is a Verhoeven jam through and through. You laugh at something über-camp one minute and feel compelled to think about the oppression of female sexuality the next. It’s a Non for the faint of heart and the easily offended, but a big fat OUI for everybody else.
Just saw it. Verhoeven on top of his game, for sure.
I believe that Benedetta’s and Annette’s passionate supporters are the same… and Annette is getting quite a bit more love, isn’t it ? We’ll see what does the jury have to say… After 2016 Palmarès anything can happen.
I saw a video review (in Spanish) that was completely enthusiastic, and also counted strong ovations for the film (not the courtesy kind)… given that the jury is headed by Spike Lee, I can see Benedetta winning the Palme d’Or. At this point, I’d say it could be the one to beat.
The reactions have been so divided but overall less enthusiastic than something like Elle, I don’t think Lee’s going be a tyrannical jury president and I wouldn’t be surprised if some jury members would veto it. So it’s not at least the frontrunner or the one to beat at this point. I’d say that the ranking of the competition titles so far in terms of how probable it is that they’d win the Palme is:
1. The Worst Person in the World
2. Lingui
3. Compartment No. 6
4. Everything Went Fine
5. Ahed’s Knee
6. Annette
7. Benedetta
8. The Divide
9. Flag Day
Looks like the probable Palm d´Or winner hasn´t screened yet.
Yes, just today they’re screening Moretti, Hamaguchi and Hansen-Love (which apparently might be her best movie yet according to a few early reactions!) and we’ve still got Farhadi, Enyedi, Serebrennikov, Audiard and Weerasethakul after that. It’s clear that they’ve collected a lot of really big players for the latter half.
Oh my god, if Mia Hansen-Love directs her best film yet it may very well be my #1 film of the year! Although I´m sceptical with those early-word enthusiastic reactions… Outside competition, The Souvenir II got some enthusiastic reviews – Guy Lodge, for example, is over the moon about it. And there is also some early word enthusiasm about “French Dispatch” (even though it hasn´t screened yet, in that respect I always wonder where those reactions are coming from – I checked the cannes-ratings.herokuapp(dot) com site).
I think that poll includes Letterboxd reactions so I’d imagine that those The French Dispatch reactions probably come from that.
By the way, totally off topic, but since I still have to think about that film experience, did the ending of “Jeanne Dielman” also shocked you? 😉 I clearly had no idea what to expect and saw that film unaware of any spoilers. For some reason I didn´t expect something spectacular to happen at all and was totally at ease with that. The ending changes the whole percetion of what was shown in the three hours before. (Of course there has been some indication of her life slowly and subtly falling apart, especially in some incidences on Day 2 – and she spends a great deal of time on Day 3 just sitting around and looking really depressed – but it didn´t strike me as a mental crisis while I saw the film). Anyway, it´s a very tough but also amazing film.
It’s of course very shocking but at the same time it didn’t feel like it was outside the movie in any way or necessarily even revealing that much that wasn’t clear previously about the character. The film keeps throughout the second half pushing the routine established to a breaking point (which is why I don’t understand comments about boring, the second half of the movie or at the very least starting from the brush flying from her hand is pretty much fully just payoff in my opinion) so eventually it feels like this character’s identity (which is defined by her control of her life) is so broken that something like that would happen. To me it was an escalation of what happened in the previous three hours, her attempting to keep going the same way in a world that’s breaking around her. Eventually her world is just too broken and her way of holding the routine and control is in fact something that is not that. But the closing shot in my opinion very much implies that she wasn’t observing this as a break in the routine but rather just another day.
No, if you think about it – in knowledge of the whole film – the ending makes sense. The reason why some viewers found the film boring is probably because Akerman shows us the daily routine in all of its ennui, uncut and observed from a somehow cold distance. Even the scenes when Jeanne is not alone but together with her son, having dinner at the table, there are long phases of silence between them and you rarely notice they have a special relationship. On Day 2, as I mentioned, you notice that her daily routine, her whole life is starting to fall apart – just little signs that become more weighty when you are aware what is happening in the end, of course.
By the way, I don´t quite agree with your remark that in the final scene she just considers what was happening as part of her routine and “just another day” (if I understood you right). I think she knows that something happened that changes everything for her. On her daily routine, for example, she for sure would have cleaned up – but instead she is sitting there at her table with her hands full of blood, probably waiting for her son to arrive or at least something to happen. She´s not able to continue her daily routine any more – at least that was my impression.
Yes, I was probably too forceful with that phrasing. It’s not just another day but it feels like the breaking of her routine has come to the point where this is the routine. She doesn’t clean up and just sits there but I don’t think the action that preceeds the closing shot is one that she thinks will liberate her but rather just one thing in a long line of choices trying to keep some vague recollection of control of her life. The closing shot is as you say her no longer being able to perform the routine that she used to do every day but I feel like it’s not her abandoing this routine but rather just continuing a broken version of it.
Perhaps I could describe my point of view towards the movie through a robotic arm. The arm has been programmed to pick up an object on a line and move it to another line. The arm does this over and over again for years until suddenly one screw becomes a little loose. The movement becomes a little odd but the robotic arm still pretty much does the job. Then the strain created by this odd movement breaks a small part of the machine and the aim is suddenly off. This kind of thing continues on and on until eventually the factory is burned down, the factory lines are destroyed and the arm has mostly broken off. However, a small stub of the arm still does the motion back and forth, not being able to actually do anything but still not stopping because stopping is an impossibility.
I think this is the main point of difference between us with this film: for me the little signs already have that exact weight the moment they start happening, they at that point signal to me how this character is breaking down. Thus while what happens at the closing is obviously an escalation, I felt that there had been a lot of groundwork for something like that (although perhaps it helped that I kind of knew what was going to happen before I watched the movie)
There is certainly something robotic, or let´s say extremely monotonous in the daily routine described thus your metaphor makes sense. I wouldn´t say I disagree with your take of Jeanne´s breakdown. For sure, in contrary to you I had no idea what was going to happen in the end, but still it was obvious that Jeanne has some unspoken problems with her life. Her son asking her why her hair is a mess was a sign she was about to lose control. There was especially one scene I found alarming, it happened in Day 2 when Jeanne had enormous problems to peel potatoes – an everyday routine she normally would manage with her eyes closed. That said, what was happening in the end was still a shock and at least to me not really hinted in those scenes of mental crisis (though it all feels logical in retrospect).
I think at least by the time I get to her running around rooms as if she didn’t know her own home or somehow expected something different to happen, it feels like something is profoundly broken and there is no fixing it
For sure, she really seems totally disoriented in some scenes. The
dramatic effect of what is happening to her is even stronger since it is
all shown en passant, without a single scene of extroverted outburst
(even the incident in the end is happening all of the sudden, as if she is
sleepwalking – this is much more shocking than her crying out loud or
something; she is almost like a ghost, a housewife ghost…)
Also, Annette is still the highest-rated competition movie (of course there’s been a lot of seemingly very good stuff outside the competition lineup) on pretty much every single poll, which considering how divisive that movie seemed to be is a little weird.
Yes, but “weird” seems to be a perfect classification for a Leos Carax film! 🙂
Correction: supposedly Spike Lee is really into The Divide. So it’s probably more like:
1. The Divide
2. Bergman Island
3. The Worst Person in the World
4. Lingui
5. Compartment No. 6
6. Drive My Car
7. Ahed’s Knee
8. Everything Went Fine
9. Annette
10. Benedetta
11. Three Floors
12. Flag Day
French press opinions here
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/60bb0a9e3b0845ae6cc9d104bcdff220a8b91c4910a8743ced498f96a7f98324.jpg
Some others as well:
Cahiers du Cinema: https://www.cahiersducinema.com/2021/07/12/cannes-2021-le-conseil-des-cahiers/
German Critics Poll: https://jury.critic.de/cannes/
Russian Critics Poll: https://kinoart.ru/cannes2021/
Ioncinema poll (newest version, keeps updating to new posts): https://www.ioncinema.com/news/film-festivals/2021-cannes-critics-panel-day-6-mia-hansen-love-bergman-island
FIPRESCI: https://www.filmneweurope.com/news/region/item/121970-fne-at-cannes-2021-see-how-the-fipresci-critics-rate-the-programme
Chinese Critics Poll: https://twitter.com/hanglutvd
Danish Critics Poll: https://www.ekkofilm.dk/stjernebarometer/cannes-festival-2021/
This actually so0unds like fun . But what do i know . One of my all time favorite movies is Ken Russell’s The Devils and as i recall that also has Nuns in it !
While I have considerable problems with that movie, I think the image of Vanessa Redgrave with her head tilted to the side is one of the most effective images in cinema.