“I have learned that trying to do only what you really want to do is deadly,” the director Paul Verhoeven says. “You have to accept, a little bit, that film is not only art; it’s art and economy.”
”) what unites Verhoeven’s wide-ranging œuvre is a character-defining sex scene. Now eighty-three, Verhoeven has a new film, “Benedetta,” which is based on an academic monograph about a pair of lesbian nuns in Renaissance Italy, Benedetta and Bartolomea, who have, yes, a lot of sex.
Did I read correctly that the dildo in the film, which is fashioned out of a statue of the Virgin Mary, was a fictional aspect of the trial? There is already—for twenty years—certainly a movement toward Puritanism. And the question that is asked is “Why would you show a sex scene?,” isn’t it?Well, you have to look at not only Hollywood but life itself. I’m here in the Hague, which is close to the beach. In the seventies, ninety per cent of the women on the beach had no bra. That was the norm—you would have taken that off. If you now go to the beach, there is nobody anymore who has no bra. They have all the bras.
She has a very childlike, mischievous energy. “Benedetta” is part of a canon of eroticized nuns, from Diderot’s “, honestly. In Holland, they are not very visible. It was more about how people at that time looked at lesbianism—that was what interested me. How did the church, how did society—in this case, a religious society—look at lesbianism? One theory was that a woman wouldgo after the wonderful man. One way of looking at it.
I saw some resonances in “Benedetta,” especially with the insurrectionist ending, with Benedetta as Jesus’ proxy, producing a kind of fictionalized revolutionary moment. The Jesus in “Benedetta” is the least realistic figure, right? The visionsvision. That is why our Jesus, when he’s on the cross, has not any genitals. That comes from a book on Hildegard of Bingen, who was an abbess in a monastery in Germany in the eleven-hundreds.
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