So we were doing things that were obvious and not so obvious, with him insisting it didn’t in any way become melodramatic. “In all Paul Verhoeven’s films there is an ambiguity in the situations. Indeed, its harshest critics have accused it of “nunsploitation”, blasphemy and resembling a sleazy cross between Hammer Horror and Carry On.Įfira admits it was sometimes difficult to keep a straight face on set. Benedetta screams “sweet Jesus” as she orgasms, at which point the film threatens to plunge into parody. When not in a trance, performing minor miracles or saving the town from the plague, Benedetta is enjoying more carnal pleasures with Bartolomea, who introduces her to sex and carves a dildo out of her treasured wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary. By now the devout Sister Benedetta, played by Efira, is 18 and plagued with bizarre, often erotic visions of a literally sexless Jesus whose loin cloth she removes. The sacred turns profane with the sudden arrival of Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia), a motherless girl fleeing her father and brothers’ incestuous abuse. Released in the UK later this month, the film is set in the Convent of the Mother of God in Counter-Reformation Italy, where Benedetta Carlini is admitted as an eight-year-old novice by the shamelessly mercenary abbess Felicita, played by Charlotte Rampling. That is also a recurring theme in Benedetta, the latest French-language film from the RoboCop, Showgirls and Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven. The story of the relationship between the two nuns and of Benedetta's fall from an abbess to an outcast is revealed in surprisingly candid archival documents and retold here with a fine sense of drama.Nun judgmental. During the course of an investigation, church authorities not only found that she had faked her visions and stigmata, but uncovered evidence of a lesbian affair with another nun, Bartolomeo. Benedetta was elected abbess due largely to these visions, but later aroused suspicions by claiming to have had supernatural contacts with Christ.

At twenty-three, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature.

Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful woman in a church community and a record of the life of a religious visionary, it is also the earliest documentation of lesbianism in modern Western history.īorn of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine.

Brown was an event of major historical importance. The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C.

Immodest acts judith brown