Benedetta

Paul Verhoeven's 2021 film is a sexually and spiritually transgressive perspective on a historical "lesbian nun."

In 2021, a right-wing Catholic organization called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property protested the New York Film Festival premiere of Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta. The film is based on the life of Benedetta Carlini, a nun and purported mystic who had a sexual relationship with another nun, and the protestors took issue with this depiction: One sign read “We vehemently protest the blasphemous lesbian movie Benedetta, that insults the sanctity of Catholic nuns.” Given that Benedetta was a French arthouse film with a limited commercial audience in the U.S., this was more likely to raise the film’s profile than dissuade audiences (the New York Film Festival tweeted a picture of the protestors with a link to buy tickets). Effective or ineffective, the virulence of their response mirrors dynamics depicted in the film—church authorities sought to snuff out the influence of blasphemous Benedetta, but found her difficult to contain.

Virginie Efira in Benedetta (IFC Films)

Verhoeven’s film is based on scholar Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Brown uncovered her subject matter in the State Archives of Florence—a note about the trial a nun who was revealed to be “a woman of ill repute” led her to uncover the details of the trial and Carlini’s life. Unexpectedly, Brown found documentation that Carlini repeatedly had sex with another nun.

This was practically inconceivable for 17th-century Italian Catholics. Sexuality was understood as phallocentric, so while religious and legal authorities specifically and extensively condemned male homosexuality, they barely acknowledged and struggled to comprehend female homosexuality. Brown’s account of Carlini’s case, then, provides a window into how religious authorities understood sex between women—and how these women, who had little-to-no context for same-sex sexuality, understood their own sexual relationships.

Brown traces Carlini’s life beginning from her devout childhood and joining of a religious group called the Theatines, located in the city of Pescia, at age 9. As an adult, Benedetta began experiencing visions—finding herself in heavenly gardens, attacked by wild animals and saved by Jesus, struggling to climb the “Mount of Perfection.” Benedetta had learned by this point to question visions: Though they may seem heavenly, they could be the work of the devil.

At the urging of her priest, she prayed for suffering, because while to feel pride and vanity because of experiencing visions could be a sign of demonic influence, the humility of pain would bring one closer to God. Her prayers were eventually answered, and she began to suffer from paralysis-inducing pain. Later, her pain was accompanied by visions increasing in intensity, and the abbess assigned a young nun named Bartolomea to support her in her physical and spiritual struggle.

Before long, Benedetta’s visions took on a new dimension: She claimed to have been given stigmata by Christ, and the telltale wounds were visible on her body. Benedetta had bolstered her divine visions with tangible evidence, and the nuns accordingly elected her as abbess. More followed: She claimed that Christ had ripped her heart out and replaced it with his own three days later, and he assigned her an angel named Splenditello to guard her purity and punish her for any transgressions by hitting her with a thorn-covered wand. Finally, Benedetta held a wedding between her and Christ at his behest, which was lavishly decorated, meticulously organized, and publicly accessible. In this ceremony, Benedetta acted as a vessel for Christ, and transmitted his message that Benedetta must be “empress” of the convent, and that anyone who does not believe in Benedetta “shall not be saved.”

Brown’s account of these events, rather than filtering Benedetta’s extraordinary rise through a skeptical contemporary lens, recounts these events directly and, as Brown expressly states is her aim, without judgment. This approach anticipates a reader’s grafting of contemporary explanations onto Benedetta’s behavior—mental illness, self-obsession, grift—and guides the reader away from jumping to these conclusions, instead providing detailed context for Benedetta’s life. Visions and religious miracles were commonly believed. Behavior was not explained by psychology, but by heavenly or hellish interference. Gender roles were strictly regimented, and women were not entitled to public speech except under highly specific circumstances—say, if Jesus Christ used a nun as a vessel to speak directly to mankind.

By rendering the dominant beliefs and ways of life in 17th-century Pescia with specificity and detail, Brown also guides the reader toward viewing Benedetta’s sexuality without the weight of preconceived notions. While investigating Benedetta’s suspiciously grandiose claims to holiness—among numerous other falsehoods, they determined that her stigmata were self-inflicted—church authorities found that Benedetta had sex with Bartolomea for years. Bartolomea had claimed that Benedetta forced herself on her, pulling her to her bed to—in their own vague and incredulous language—“stir on top of her so much that both of them corrupted themselves,” in addition to oral sex and mutual masturbation. (Brown notes that it’s difficult to ascertain whether Benedetta actually pressured Bartolomea or whether she was a willing participant, given that claiming to be the victim of force would have helped Bartolomea avoid punishment.) According to Bartolomea, Benedetta also frequently evoked Splenditello to coerce her into sex. Speaking through Benedetta, Splenditello, who Benedetta described as an angelic boy, told Bartolomea that their acts were not sinful, but holy.

This provided both a religious and a social logic to sexual acts that would be baffling to most—they was sanctioned by God, and, in a roundabout way, heterosexual. Benedetta could use it for cover, Bartolomea for permission, and the church authorities for something resembling rational explanation. Brown’s description of Benedetta as a “lesbian nun,” in light of the history she describes, is something of a misnomer: From Brown’s description, Benedetta comes across as sexually ravenous and devoted to Bartolomea, yet she fit her desires into a religious frame that she could understand.

If Brown’s book is a careful, succinct history that puts Benedetta’s homosexuality, mysticism, and gendered transgressions into a specific cultural context¹, Verhoeven’s film is an orgiastic-philosophic mêlée, where the director interweaves his own religious and sexual preoccupations with a thoughtful reconstruction of the past.

Verhoeven, the Dutch director best known for a string of high-profile Hollywood films including Basic Instinct and Showgirls, brings a bit of maximalist pop sensibility to the more austere subject matter of Benedetta. Instead of the possibly one-sided sexual relationship between Benedetta and Bartolomea depicted in Brown’s book, Verhoeven and co-screenwriter David Birke depict Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) as a seductive interloper who initiates the sexual relationship with the devout Benedetta. True to Verhoeven’s background in erotic thrillers, he imbues their sex scenes with a titillating voyeurism, and shuffles the power dynamic between the two of them to build tension and intrigue.

Notably, Verhoeven and Birke excise Splenditello from the narrative. While the boy angel is central to Brown’s idea of how Benedetta and Bartolomea justified their sexual relationship, the two women in the film simply have sex with a mutual acknowledgment of their attraction. No justification is needed: Bartolomea has no deep-seated religious conviction and is content to pursue pleasure, and Benedetta begins to view sexuality itself as divine. Their lack of sexual shame sets them apart from the rest of the convent and the existing religious and social order—as the film progresses, the relationship reads less as an illicit affair and more as a rebellion against a religious culture that restricts the expression of sexuality and women’s self-determination.

Verhoeven and Birke further illustrate the tension between the Catholic social order and the lives and desires of women through the film’s three central characters, all of whom have distinct social roles and perspectives on convent life: Benedetta, whose faith is the governing force of her life, Bartolomea, who lives in the convent but has no religious faith, and the Abbess Felicita (Charlotte Rampling), who approaches her role with more financial pragmatism than devoutness.

Benedetta’s life and personality echo Brown’s factual depiction of Benedetta Carlini; she is doggedly faithful yet self-possessed to the point of alienating the convent and violating church dogma. Verhoeven takes Benedetta’s visions at face value: He frequently depicts them from Benedetta’s perspective, and though characters raise objections and provide explanations for their inauthenticity, he never concludes whether they’re “real” or “fake.” In fact, it’s beside the point. When Bartolomea confronts Benedetta about cutting her hands and forehead with broken glass to mimic stigmata, she claims that she doesn’t know how the stigmata appeared, and even if she did cut herself, it was God’s will. Benedetta, then, reads as a possible true believer despite the outlandishness of her claims.

Bartolomea’s life and personality, given the dearth of factual biographical information, are invented for the film. She enters the convent after fleeing her physically and sexually abusive father and brothers, and Benedetta’s parents pay for her place at Benedetta’s behest. Bartolomea clearly does not care about religious life, and has only come to the convent as a place of refuge. This acts as a commentary on two historical details Brown describes: the presence of non-religious women in religious groups, and the financial structure of convents. Women’s role in public life was severely curtailed, and they often had little-to-no choice for how they would spend their adult lives. Typically, their parents would arrange a marriage or send them to a convent. Convent life, as Brown describes it, could be far preferable to marriage. Rather than submitting to the will of a strange man and spending one’s life largely confined to his home, a woman could have a busy, purposeful life with a large group of other women.

Convents, though, required substantial payments (as marriages required dowries), so the more established convents were often populated with the children of wealthy and well-connected men. Rather than a spiritual calling, life as a nun could be pre-determined by the social position of one’s family. In history and in Verhoeven’s film, the Theatines were a religious group which was not yet an officially sanctioned convent when Benedetta joined, which enabled many who could not find a place in established convents to pursue a religious life. Yet payment was still necessary, and perhaps even more so considering the funding needed to keep up daily operations and elevate the group’s stature. That Bartolomea enters the convent in a state of distress and need is irrelevant; she can only enter once Benedetta’s well-off parents sponsor her.

Abbess Felicita functions as a personification of religious life’s financial imperatives. In her first appearance, she negotiates with Benedetta’s parents over the price of her admittance, and her character from there is defined by efficiency and skepticism. She distrusts the “miracles” and “visions” that Benedetta experiences, yet realizes that the presence of a mystic in their midst could benefit the entire group. In league with the father confessor, she agrees to elevate Benedetta to Abbess to capitalize on Benedetta’s publicity-attracting visions, which have already endeared her to the public. Through Felicita, Verhoeven shows the viewer the structures of Catholicism in Renaissance Italy: Rather than renounce the worldly, many had to operate in the tangible realms of finance and public relations to keep their organizations afloat.

Verhoeven and Birke draw these three women into unresolvable conflict. Benedetta proves to be a controversial and near-dictatorial leader, punishing those who question her authority and the veracity of her visions. Sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte), Felicita’s daughter, is her most vocal detractor. Benedetta orders Christina to flagellate herself in front of the entire convent after Christina accuses her of inventing her visions, an accusation Felicita refuses to corroborate. Christina, devastated, jumps off the roof of the convent, and Felicita decides that Benedetta’s leadership has gone too far. Felicita embarks to Florence to inform the nuncio (Lambert Wilson) of Benedetta’s suspicious behavior, armed with a key piece of information—through a peephole she carved, Felicita witnessed Bartolomea penetrating Benedetta with a whittled Virgin Mary statuette.

The Virgin Mary dildo was one of the most contentious aspects of the film upon its release, yet Verhoeven provided a clear-cut and historically rational explanation for this plot point. He wanted the film to culminate with Benedetta being sentenced to death, leading her to start a popular revolt against her punishment. To place this ending in an accurate historical context, Verhoeven needed to up the ante of Benedetta and Bartolomea’s sexual crimes:

I realized that historically I could not have her condemnation to the stake in 1625 because of lesbian behavior — that would have been wrong, historically false. Judy Brown talked about the instruments. First, in 1525 the Church thought if a woman had sex with a woman, she should be burned. Later, the Church softened it down and said, if a woman has sex with another woman, she should be punished — but she if had an instrument, she was burned at the stake.

Reflective of the phallocentric sexuality of the time, sex using a physical instrument for penetration—homosexual or heterosexual—was one of the worst sexual crimes a person could commit because of its purported unnaturalness. Upon arriving at the convent, the nuncio orders Bartolomea to be tortured. Bartolomea sells out Benedetta to escape further torture and death, and Benedetta is sentenced to burn at the stake. Before her execution, Benedetta visits the dying Felicita, who contracted the plague in Florence, and makes a final request of her.

When Benedetta is brought to the square, she delivers her last words in a characteristic trance: She proclaims that her death will bring plague upon the town, at which Felicita appears cloaked in black—a sentinel of death—and reveals her lesions. Benedetta succeeds in whipping the crowd into a frenzy, and they free her from the burning stake, then attack the nuncio, tearing apart his clothes to reveal that he, too, is covered with lesions. Felicita walks straight into the fire, and Benedetta and Bartolomea run off together. We last see them post-coital and nude at an abandoned farm, where Benedetta tells a disbelieving Bartolomea she will return to the convent to save the city, still fully convinced of her holiness. The final title cards reveal that Benedetta was imprisoned in the convent and died at the age of 70, and that Pescia was spared from the plague.

Note that Felicita dies in agony, Bartolomea is left to fend for herself, and Benedetta, while punished, escapes execution and apparently saves Pescia from the plague. Among the competing philosophies the three women embody—of money, physical pleasure, and spiritual faith—Benedetta’s wins out. This is not an uncomplicated victory for faith, though; Benedetta is a morally dubious, sadistic, possibly delusional character whose acts and beliefs all turn back toward herself. Her faith, as portrayed in the film, seems strong, but the possibility that it is all a façade and a grift is always present. As Verhoeven describes it, Benedetta’s faith is consistent only in that it is consistently self-serving:

In her brain, Benedetta creates a Jesus that is saying what she wants anyway … Her Jesus is somebody that always changes to fit the direction she wants to go in. He sanctifies her decisions, makes them sacred. It comes from him that she can have sex, which at the time was forbidden …

I thought it would be interesting to show her doing things but let the audience make up their mind. I wanted to show her visions without telling you what to think. The visions, though, are completely parallel to where she wants to go. She uses her religion as a tool to do something that is absolutely forbidden.

Verhoeven creates the space for ambiguity through Benedetta—her visions are real and they are not, she is faithful and she is heretical, she is holy and she is demonic. Both/and, not either/or. The way I read Benedetta, with Verhoeven’s comments and her self-sacrificial return to the convent in mind, is that she is faithful to the bone, yet her belief in Christ is matched by her belief in herself. Benedetta has completely defined herself by her religion since childhood, and every desire she has—for sex, for power, for love, for approval—she molds to fit her devotion to God. This stands in stark contrast to the mercenary Felicita and the cartoonishly craven nuncio, religious authorities whose priorities are maintaining social order. Selfish as Benedetta is, her faith is steadfast and blazing in comparison to the stultified culture she was born into. In Verhoeven’s conception, Benedetta’s pursuit of sex with another nun and blatant self-promotion are admirably radical given the forceful repression of queer sexuality and women’s public speech: Intentionally or not, she burst through ironclad boundaries.

In a promotional interview for the film, Verhoeven mentioned that he briefly converted to Pentecostalism in his 20s: “I felt the presence of Jesus in my heart. I mean literally—I physically felt it.” The deep, almost carnal embodiment of his faith mirrors Benedetta Carlini’s claims to Christ’s physical presence in her life. Carlini was someone who claimed Jesus reached into her chest, ripped out her heart, left her with an empty cavity for three days, then pushed his own massive heart into her. For a man who once felt faith as a physical union, and has cinematically framed sexuality as a both an inexorable natural force and a tool of power, Benedetta Carlini’s story is a natural fit. While Judith Brown uncovered and decoded her forgotten and transgressive life, Verhoeven probed her story’s erotic and spiritual power through his own distinct lens.

1. I highly recommend Brown’s book if you’re interested to learn more about Carlini’s life and the sexual and religious culture of Renaissance Italy, but if you’re interested in a briefer historical account of the same topics, I also recommend the episode of the Bad Gays podcast about Carlini.