Benedetta

A Catholic activist group is petitioning a cinema in Belfast for showing lesbian nun film Benedetta on Good Friday. The film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, ...

So I think the word blasphemy in this case is stupid.” “This movie is a fraud and nothing more than a blatant attack on the Catholic faith,” Damien Murphy, a spokesman for the Irish Society for Christian Civilisation told Belfast Telegraph. The film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is based on the real-life 17th-century nun Benedetta Carlini, and is released this Friday (April 15).

'Nunspoiltation' doesn't quite cut it when it comes to the work of this fiendishly talented auteur.

There’s too much full-frontal nudity to completely discount Verhoeven’s prurient side, and too much fervency to write him off as a horndog with one thing on the brain. And yet Verhoeven’s handsome visual polish goes hand in hand with a more receptive attitude toward Christianity out of joint with the premise’s origins in high-grade trash. Her undeniable attraction to fellow nun Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) sends her into literal paroxysms of horniness – try as she may to channel those feelings onto the Sexy Jesus rocking her in fantasies straight out of a bodice-ripper paperback. (The eye-grabbing promotional poster bearing a cheeky semicircle of nipple still left a great deal to the imagination.) The breathless tweets from the Croisette premiere at 2021’s Cannes Film Festival seemed to confirm that dirty old man Verhoeven was back at full lech, with excited chatter about whittled dildos and vaginal torture instruments flying this way and that. Such anti-blockbusters as RoboCop and Starship Troopers ratcheted up the red-blooded thirst for violence in the police and military, while Showgirls turned the lubed-up American libido into a writhing, thrashing parody of itself. The impish Dutch filmmaker specialises in isolating an artistic category’s defining quality and exaggerating it to warp his subject, ultimately upending our preconceived image of it.

Catholic organisation ISFCC has launched a petition to ban the release of film Benedetta, loosely based on the true story of a lesbian nun.

While causing outrage amongst Catholics and Christians, critics so far seem to be impressed with Benedetta, with the film so far boasting an impressive 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. Metro.co.uk has reached out to the ISFCC and reps for Paul for comment. Benedetta has been effectively outlawed in Singapore, where it was refused classification by the IMDA, and its showing at the New York Film Festival in 2021 was hit with protests by Catholic groups. A petition set up by the Irish Society for Christian Civilisation (ISFCC) says it wants to ‘STOP MUBI’s & Verhoeven’s Benedetta Movie (sic)’, describing it as a ‘smart smut attack on the Holy Catholic Church.’ And with the release just days away, a Catholic activist organisation is demanding the movie be pulled. Loosely based on a true story, director Paul set his film on the 1986 non-fiction book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.

Paul Verhoeven's new film Benedetta resurrects a notorious strain of exploitation movie mingling the sexual and the sacred.

In its shrill opening section, first a discredited, peacocking priest (Ben Hall) and then a showboating celebrity exorcist (Chris Browning) attempt to get the devil out of the possessed nun Agnes (Hayley McFarland), only to see their patriarchal authority violently undermined by the young woman’s extreme rebellion. In the wake of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s nostalgically down-and-dirty double feature Grindhouse (2007), for a while the ossified corpus of exploitation cinema became a voguish repertoire for knowing parody and pastiche – and inevitably nunsploitation would soon get a look in. The second part abandons both nunsploitation tropes and most of the characters, instead centring on Agnes’s melancholic friend and fellow nun Mary (Molly Quinn), now back outside the convent to seek meaning and God in a profane, confusing ‘real world’. Despite featuring nuns galore (including a Mother Superior played by Alida Valli!), wild confessions, lesbianism and other markers of the subgenre, this plays out equally as a giallo, its plot propelled as much by confounded identity and whodunnit mystery as by Catholic hang-ups. Walerian Borowczyk is a fetishistic director of objects, and so this feature, drawn from Stendhal’s Promenades dans Rome (1883), opens with a slow tilt up and down a painting of a near naked Jesus. A male worker brings a joint of meat to the convent, donning chastity glasses to avoid temptation while he carves the beef for the nuns. Flashbacks show her serially trapped: in the closed patriarchy of her abusive father’s home, in guilt over her brother’s death, and in an unwanted pregnancy out of wedlock. Here lesbian nun Sister Sarah (Asun Ortega) engages in a ‘holy war’ against a corrupted clergy and vicious bike gangs who together drugged and prostituted her. Reinvesting the subgenre’s usual sadomasochism and sacrilege with immaculate aesthetic stylisations, it engages seriously with the fragility of faith, as personified by the complex figure of Father Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe) – all at once hypocrite, victim, rapist and earnest seeker of divine truth in a fallen world. Since having a brain tumour excised, middle-aged, domineering Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg) seems increasingly to belong to the psychiatric ward where she works as a doctor’s assistant. Norifumi Suzuki’s feature opens with liberated 1970s woman Maya (Yumi Takigawa) entering the Saint Clore Abbey, on a Shock Corridor-like undercover mission to investigate past secrets and enact her revenge. Like Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s artful proto-nunsploitationer Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), Ken Russell’s film is based on the 17th-century Loudun possessions, although it deals with an earlier part of the story. Christianity is a minority religion in Japan, yet the country has produced a surprising number of nunsploitation films whose cloistered furnishings are used to allegorise the nation’s insularity, repressiveness and patriarchy.

Benedetta, which is set to be released on Friday 15 April, centres on Sister Benedetta Carlini, who lived at the Abbess of the Theatine convent in Pescia in the ...

"To launch this film on Good Friday is a calculated insult to Christians everywhere. This immoral film blasphemously features: "In a shocking attack on Good Friday, film company MUBI will launch Benedetta across Ireland and the UK, a film which horribly insults Our Lady and her Son," the petition reads.

A CATHOLIC activist group have condemned the release of a new "offensive" film about lesbian nuns.Upcoming movie Benedetta, from Basic Instinct direct.

Loosely based on a true story, director Paul set his film on the 1986 non-fiction book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Upcoming movie Benedetta, from Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven, is set to be released on April 15 - much to the dismay of some. A CATHOLIC activist group have condemned the release of a new "offensive" film about lesbian nuns.

As well as engaging in a secret affair, the main character, nun Benedetta Carlini, is seduced by a highly sexualised Jesus Christ. A scene in the film, which ...

There is not one director in Hollywood or Europe who would dare mock Mohammed or the Jewish faith – it just wouldn’t happen. Mr Cashin defended the movie’s release in Ireland as a positive sign for the liberal progression of the film industry and society. Objector John O’Donovan said on RTÉ’s Liveline of the release date for the film: ‘There is an attack on Christians and Catholicism right around the world.’