Early on in the festival, Cannes played the scandal card with Paul Verhoeven’s nun film “Benedetta” – alongside innovative contributions by directors Andrea Arnold and Catherine Corsini.
Thousands of journalists are said to be missing on the Croisette this year, but who would notice? The remaining 3000 always ensure the typical bustle. Querying vaccination or test certificates alone ensures impressive queues, even away from the gala performances. What is undoubtedly missing is that cinema pessimism that saw the demise of his favorite art sealed by the triumphant advance of Netflix even before the pandemic. A new film palace has now even been opened in the suburb of La Bocca. The Cineum Imax, a high-end cinema equipped with the latest laser technology and 513 movable chairs, shines just under four kilometers from the festival center. With the deconstructivist metal facade, star architect Rudy Ricciotti is somewhat reminiscent of Frank O. Gehry’s famous Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
But if you were looking for a nickname for the theater among the earlier festival winning films, it would probably be “the tin drum”. The fact that the US-American Imax group is not necessarily known for demanding festival programs shouldn’t worry these days when the official program also flickers on this 23-meter screen. In any case, on the third day it already turned into popular and genre cinema.
The Dutch veteran of noble trash, Paul Verhoeven, is happy to take on the role that is usually not expected until the middle of the festival, to let the scandalous cat out of the bag. A few days before his 83rd birthday, the director of “Turkish Fruits” and “Basic Instinct” presented his first monastery film – apart from the spectacular Hollywood flop “Show Girls”, which celebrated a strip club almost like a place of religious rituals . “Benedetta” is the film adaptation of Judith Cora Brown’s biography “Shameful Passions: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Italy at the Time of the Renaissance”. The idea came from screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, who of course had his name deleted from the end credits during preproduction due to excessive sexualization.
That would not be an accusation that could scare Verhoeven. Whenever an erotic staging can be developed in the historical figure from the 17th century’s radical Jesus love, an aesthetic nude scene with the leading actress Virginie Efira is not far away. And when Benedetta is introduced to physical love by the novice Bartolomea, played by Daphné Patakia, you literally imagine yourself in the 70s soft porn (who also likes to “venture” behind monastery walls). Finally, an inquisitor will search for the symbolic corpus delicti: a statue of Mary carved into a dildo.
The voyeurism debate that a director sparked here in 2013 with a winning film that aestheticized lesbian sexuality has not yet been forgotten. But “Blue is a warm color” by Abdellatif Kechiche is of course a much more important film than Verhoeven’s “Benedetta”.
So why is Cannes looking for such a predictable scandal when, on the other hand, you have a problem with the low representation of women filmmakers?
What to leave Verhoeven: he knows exactly what he’s doing The accusation of voyeurism does not bother him, the aim of his provocation is the latent sexualization of the Jesus cult and in particular the iconography of the nuns’ film. And there he undoubtedly makes a point: Hollywood loved to make attractive actresses like Audrey Hepburn into innocence icons. Verhoeven was clearly based on the sultry aestheticism of what is probably the best of all monastery films, “The Black Narcissus” by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. This is probably the explanation for how this unrestrained piece of camp made it into the competition: It celebrates the power of cinema – using the example of a genre that is notorious for luxurious hypocrisy.
Real formal innovation could be found in two other very popular contributions: Both came from women directors. Andrea Arnold’s documentary “Cow”, shown in the sub-section “Un certain regard”, shows the life of a cattle from birth to foreseeable death practically from the first person. In her feature films, too, the British woman made impressionistic nature photographs a trademark, now there is little else. It is a thoroughly exhilarating film about the realizable utopia of humane agriculture.
And then there is the French Catherine Corsini, who devotes herself to an unrecognized genre in an innovative way. Your “La Fracture” is a hospital film, as dramatic as a war film. During a demonstration by the yellow vests movement overshadowed by police violence, different social classes meet in a crowded hospital. The central figure is a comic book publisher played by the hardly fallible Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who finds herself between the camps.
But the result is less conciliatory social drama than grotesquely over-the-top fireworks – a masterful directorial effort that a jury can hardly overlook.
