Benedetta to Mother Joan of the Angels: The incendiary spectacle of wilful blasphemy

Benedetta ( Virginie Efira ), the 17th century Catholic nun who gives Paul Verhoeven’s sacrilege extravaganza its title, is beset by feverish visions of a bearded dream-boat Jesus. In one vision, she walks towards the crucifix, places her hands over his bloodied hands, and strips off his loincloth for a passionate make-out session. When a novice with whom she is falling in lust grabs her ass, it provokes a vision of being attacked by a tangle of serpents which are hacked away by dreamboat Jesus. Another make-out session ensues. A later vision recasts the Lord and Saviour as her knight in shining armour saving her from being raped by a group of soldiers. These visions, framed like music videos and medieval action movies, find Benedetta inhabiting the roles of a bride of Christ or a damsel in distress. But she yearns to be more. In Verhoeven’s no-holds-barred retelling of a true story documented in Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts, Efira embodies a woman deemed a saint by some and a heretic by others. A true story of repressed desire and religious hypocrisy is brought to life by one of cinema’s greatest iconoclasts. When the Catholic Church launched an investigation into Benedetta’s supposed communion with God and the veracity of her stigmata, they found out she was in a relationship with another nun named Bartolomea ( Daphne Patakia ). A lesbian relationship that Verhoeven charts through blasphemous sex scenes, including one where the two nuns use a wooden Virgin Mary dildo.

Images speak louder than words in exercises of provocation. The pious and the profane co-exist, commingle and collide in Benedetta, as they did in the “nunsploitation movies” that peaked in the 1970s. The exploitation sub-genre was as unmistakably European as giallo or Spaghetti westerns and as unmistakably codified in Catholic traditions as exorcism movies. Movies belonging to the genre saw nuns engage in a variety of exhibitionist transgressions, not limited to acts of sexual congress. Mother Superiors give into sadistic drives. Vows are broken, iconography defiled, forbidden fruits binged. Pleasure and pain, sex and suffering converge in the horrors and delights of the genre. For nunsploitation plays on the idea of religion as a form of masochism, especially a religion which contends we are born sinners, endorses self-denial for mastery over the body, and expects its followers to suffer as the son of God himself did. “Your worst enemy is your body,” suggests a nun in Benedetta. So they didn’t have to pay large dowries while marrying off their daughters, patriarchs in Renaissance Italy often packed young women off to the convent which settled for much reasonable dowries. Nuns being brides of Christ and all still had to pay up to pray up. We see this in Benedetta too, as she is packed off to the abbey at the age of nine. Once there, the nuns must take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. All traces of femininity must be concealed within their habits. In one of Benedetta’s posters, an exposed nipple peers out of the habit in defiance, attesting to the film’s intentions. Walled in and isolated from the rest of the world like inmates, the nuns assert their identity against the strict, and often hostile, boundaries imposed upon their lives. Pleasure challenges the primacy of prayer. Sororial transgressions are elevated to acts of rebellion against the patriarchal structure that forces women into such suffocatingly cloistered environments, and the religious dogma that enforces such stringent codes of moral propriety. Benedetta can thus be seen as a proto-feminist figure who ran in opposition to the repressive male hierarchy of the Catholic Church. She believed she was destined to pave the way for a more women-friendly moral authority and pushed the cause for sexual agency — only to be punished for it. Given its gleeful blasphemy, Benedetta attracted some protestors who mobilised against the film’s release in the US. Compare this to the overreaction surrounding _Tandav_ in India. FIRs were registered. Calls for bans were made. Two scenes in the web-series, not in the least bit inflammatory when weighed up against Benedetta, supposedly hurt Hindu sentiments and ultimately got the chop. No religion should be beyond criticism. And constraining free expression to appease extremist elements fortifies majority viewpoints at the cost of the minority, and undermines the concept of religious pluralism. While the roots of nunsploitation can be traced to Black Narcissus (1947) or even all the way back to Häxan (1922), it was The Devils (1971) that set the genre on its more unapologetically sacrilegious path. Ken Russell dramatized the 17th century story of demonic possession and mass hysteria that Aldous Huxley had recounted in the non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudun. Just as it does in Benedetta, the plague looms as a sign of moral decay in the 17th century France of The Devils. A priest is burnt alive after a Mother Superior accuses him of making a pact with the Devil and seducing her entire convent of nuns. Polish filmmaker Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1962) can be seen as a follow-up of sorts, even if it predates The Devils by nine years, picking up the Loudun saga from where it was left off. All that remains of the priest is charred debris. Clergymen have come and gone unable to exorcise the nuns and Mother Superior, seemingly possessed by up to eight demons. The latest arrival finds himself tempted by the so-called sins of the flesh. Sexual desire is sublimated into self-flagellation. Nuns appear in a trance during exorcism rituals. Stablemen are sacrificed. Where Russell opts for excess, Kawalerowicz opts for a more muted approach. Shooting in high-contrast black and white emphasises the rigid framework the nuns find themselves. Most of the action is confined to the convent, the stables and a nearby inn, the camerawork reinforcing just how cloistered and claustrophobic the nuns felt. The camera, at times, assumes a subjective POV to hint at a possible demonic presence. But the film keeps it ambiguous, refusing to answer if a demon’s hand is at play, or just religious hysteria.

Dogma comes in the way of young love in The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine. Italian director Sergio Grieco transposes the story of Romeo & Juliet to a convent in the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Lucita (Jenny Tamburi) is sent to the convent by her father for falling in love with rival clan member Esteban (Paolo Malco). Branded a heretic and wounded by Inquisition guards, Esteban takes refuge in the convent with the hopes of rescuing Lucita. Only, the wicked Mother Superior has plans of her own. When the nuns are all locked in by the Inquisitor, mass hysteria breaks out. There are whippings aplenty and lesbian S&M. Grieco’s movie revels in the same kind of excesses as Russell’s The Devils but not to as forceful an effect. If anything, it works best as a faithful if not fascinating exercise in nunsploitation.

When done well, nunsploitation films function as allegories for how women’s bodies become sexual and political battlegrounds. In Benedetta, The Devils and Mother Joan of the Angels, we see the Catholic Church try to capitalise on scandals to consolidate their power. These films question institutions, acting as divine extensions, that continue to enforce their dogma and rob women of their bodily autonomy and personal freedoms. Kawalerowicz’s description of Mother Joan of the Angels in an interview condenses the arguments of the nunsploitation genre. “Matka Joanna od aniolów (the film’s Polish title) is a film against dogma. That is the universal message of the film. It is a love story about a man and a woman who wear church clothes, and whose religion does not allow them to love each other. They often talk about and teach about love – how to love God, how to love each other – and yet they cannot have the love of a man and a woman because of their religion. This dogma is itself inhuman. The devils that possess these characters are the external manifestations of their repressed love. The devils are like sins, opposite to their human nature. It is like the devils give the man and woman an excuse for their human love. Because of that excuse, they are able to love.” Benedetta, Mother Joan of the Angels and The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine are now streaming on MUBI. Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru. Read all the  **_Latest News_** _,_  **_Trending News_** _,_  **_Cricket News_** _,_  **_Bollywood News_** _,_  **_India News_**  and  **_Entertainment News_**  here. Follow us on  Facebook_,_  Twitter and  Instagram_._