TOheralded as “the film that shook the Cannes Film Festival”, Blessed – at the cinema since yesterday – is actually yet another project that attests the passion for provocation of the director and screenwriter Paul Verhoeven. Known in Hollywood with blockbuster movies like RoboCop, Act of Force, Showgirls, Elle – Golden Globes and Oscar nominations for Isabelle Huppert – and the cult 90s basic instinctwhich has confused the whole world with the famous crossing of legs by Sharon Stone, Verhoeven this time focused on a story that shows an unusual face of monastic life. Breaking every ethical scheme but on certain historical bases.
The source material is in fact a book by Judith C. Brown – Impure acts – Life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy – writer and historian among the first to investigate studies on the history of sexuality. A passion that led her to fathom the trial a Benedetta Carliniabbess of the monastery of Pescia, accused at the beginning of the 1600s of homosexuality and heresy.
A story that Paul weaves with the imagination suspending everything in a raw and ambiguous atmospheredirty and candid, which continually overturns the certainty of the miracle: that is, if we are faced with a woman in contact with the divine mystery or a perverse addicted to forbidden practices and psychological control. In the middle: the condemnation of the Church-system.
A scene from the movie “Benedict”. (Movies Inspired)
Blessed: the plot of the movie
Benedetta, played by Virginia Efirais a young Tuscan who, at the end of the seventeenth century, while Italy is ravaged by the plague, she enters a convent of Benedictine nuns, despite the resistance of the abbessto which the award-winning gives a face and voice Charlotte Rampling. Predestined to holiness as a child, already as a novice, begins to manifest strange visions, mystical and erotic.
To shock his personal how extravagant relationship with Jesus is the arrival of Sister Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) with whom he finds himself in the same cell to share remnants of comfort from visions that they fear have demonic origin. But, in reality, an unusual desire burns between the two sisters, a physical and spiritual attraction that disrupts monastic life until generating a scandal that crosses the walls of the convent.
The judgments of the critics
The story of Benedetta Carlini, imbued with irreverence and sapphism, it intertwines perfectly with the carnal, brazen and provocative cinema of Paul Verhoeven which, already during the preview presentation at the Cannes Film Festival 2021, caused a lot of discussion.
Countless controversies aroused among Catholics who, in various countries, organized protests against the film defined as blasphemous. In Russia, even the religious group of the Orthodox Church has sent so many reports to the Ministry of Culture to prevent its distribution.
Disputes that don’t undermine the director who, at almost 85 years of age, continues to enjoy himself by staging, this time, the most contradictory aspects of the religious institution.
Showing its lights and shadows, in complete freedom, with an irony that never falls into the ridiculous, it gets the promotion of critics attracted by the hypnotic combination of sin and redemption, mystery and mysticism, salvation and hell, which destabilizes the most conservatives.
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