Surprise! A French shock Jaques director hates the Catholic Church and has created a movie calculated to outrage the faithful and win plaudits from the elites. Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven's latest flick is an anti-Catholic porno.
Benedetta is a profane trash heap about 17th century lesbian nuns that’s full of violence and extremely gratuitous sex scenes between women whose vocations are supposed to involve a life of dutiful chastity before God. Supposedly it’s based on a true story. And of course this kind of disgusting, subversive content sets just the right mood for the foreign film fest circuit, and apparently Benedetta is all the rage at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Hey you know, this is timely. As Catholic churches in Canada and Latin America are being burned to the ground by the demonic left, Verhoeven’s taking a cinematic torch to Christ’s earthly establishment as well.
The Hollywood Reporter's review took the film seriously. Sure, scandalize Christianity in the most disgusting manner possible, and let’s ponder it earnestly, shall we? THR called Verhoeven "a scholar, of sorts, on the teachings of Christianity,“ But but said he's willing to challenge them — or more like torture and blaspheme until they’re begging for mercy — in his latest boundary-pushing drama.”
Why yes, let’s take the most sacred thing in reality and smear excrement on it. That’s real “boundary pushing.”
THR said the film “has all the elements of a vintage Verhoeven brew: sex, violence, betrayals, moral ambiguity, religious hypocrisy — and, of course, a Virgin Mary statue that’s transformed into a dildo.” Oh, so it makes The Exorcist look like VeggieTales.
According to Variety, critics who questioned Verhoeven about the film being blasphemous caught the director in an indignant mood. He told them, “I don’t really understand how you can really blaspheme about something that happened, even in 1625. You cannot change history, you cannot change things that happened, and I based it on the things that happened.”
But even lefty critics have slammed this movie for depicting lesbian sex from the perspective of the “male gaze.” In other words, it’s obvious the film is, in earnest, shlocky porn. But let’s pretend there is some accurate history going on here.
THR admitted the film could be written off as “ludicrous” or “over-the-top,” but threw it a lifeline, saying there “is a method to Verhoeven’s madness”:
Benedetta is about a woman clawing her way to power in a male-dominated world, gradually finding her own voice and then achieving emancipation.
Oh so, it's actually a film about women’s empowerment? And scene where the most important and holy woman in history is reduced to a sex toy really drives that home, right?