Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

 

It’s not hard to see why Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta was viewed in some quarters as blasphemous or insensitive or offensive; the director’s lusty approach to religious-themed material all but invites those judgments. But by the same token, its vividness and brashness, its embrace of the shocking and scandalous, gives it the feeling of playing for high stakes: in depicting a devout believer who nevertheless embraces transgression (particularly in matters of sexual pleasure), then it posits faith as something full and complex and, for all its deprivations, scintillating (in this respect at least, Bunuel sometimes comes to mind in watching the film). Set in the 17^th century, the film starts with Benedetta’s childhood admission to the convent: as a young adult, evidence of her potential saintliness accumulates, and she’s eventually named Mother Superior; one of the film’s delicious ambiguities is that while the Mother she displaces (Charlotte Rampling) is more correct in her behaviour and her devotion to the institution’s well-being, Benedetta (despite her highly reciprocated sexual desire for a novice nun) is the truer believer and more likely instrument of God’s will. The film is as propulsive and gripping as any of Verhoeven’s high-voltage Hollywood works, with action scenes of comparable impact (several of them built around visions of a very dynamic Jesus); the lead actress Virginie Efira is extraordinarily and fully present, not least in the very frank love-making scenes. The film’s intense physicality manifests itself in multiple ways: the deep-rooted fascination of stigmata (amplified here by unanswered questions about whether Benedetta’s bleeding wounds are self-inflicted, and even if they are, does that inherently reduce their God-given significance), a focus on bodily orifices and excretions, on the details of sexual pleasure, on the can’t-look-away horrors of the plague that threatens the surrounding country, all contributing to a startling overall viewing experience.

Aspen (Frederick Wiseman, 1991)

 

Frederick Wiseman’s 1991 Aspen differs from comparable studies like the Boston-set City Hall and Monrovia, Indiana in spending little time on the community apparatus: there’s nothing here of council meetings or ski resort management discussions, and the de rigueur aspects of the project (ski slopes, ski lifts, skiers) are dispensed with fairly cursorily. Instead, Wiseman’s emphasis is on spiritual questioning and searching, taking us into several extended discussions and lectures on such topics on reconciling oneself to divorce from a religious perspective, or on whether capitalism can be reconciled with religious teachings on justice (inevitably, the contributions to these discussions occasionally carry a note of anxious self-interest). Some of what we’re shown is unseemly or borderline absurd, such as a rather ridiculously mentored art class in an over-the-top house, or a plastic surgery presentation seeming to disproportionately focus on undesirable “ethnic” features; others, like a lively discussion of a Flaubert short story, are sincere and committed, if disproportionately populated by seemingly well-to-do retirees with ample time on their hands. In contrast, a fortieth wedding anniversary party held in an apparently much more low-budget and functional location reverberates with genuine human warmth and spontaneity, whereas a group of immigrants worries even about the availability of basic housing (and, again, about the relative advantages of having paler skin). The film’s final sequence, an eloquently conceived and delivered sermon about the building of religious community, provides a note of hope that these disparate outlooks and circumstances might somehow find common purpose (an optimism unfortunately not much borne out by subsequent decades). In a tiny concession to Aspen celebrity-spotting, the film includes a brief shot of CBS newsman Ed Bradley amid others in a local gym, and (I think) British newsman Jon Snow among those playing a cozy (and somewhat ribald) game of charades.

Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina, 1973)

 

Corrado Farina’s two best-known directorial works, They Have Changed their Face and Baba Yaga, both feature supernatural themes in a modern-day setting (vampires and witches respectively): a quirkier similarity is that they both contain pseudo-intellectual citations of Jean-Luc Godard and feature odd parodies of product commercials (for LSD and detergent respectively). The former is the more narratively robust work, its slow build-up of Nosferatu mythology taking a sudden swerve into sharp corporate satire, but Baba Yaga is, if nothing else, the more stimulating visual experience. The film’s most direct reference is Antonioni’s Blow-Up: another photographer (in this case a woman, Valentina, played by Isabelle de Funes) who hosts a succession of models in her home studio: the studio is an eye-candy marvel, from the zebra skin on the wall above the bed to the transparent telephone to the library-worthy stock of art books. Walking alone one night, Valentina encounters a strange older woman (Carroll Baker, with very few lines, which is probably just as well) who rapidly takes a close, sensuously-tinged interest in her, including giving the gift of a creepily-staring doll which may have the power to come to life and cause mayhem; it’s all somewhat hampered by brevity though, Valentina and her boyfriend extricating themselves in 80 minutes more easily than seemed likely, and without any very meaningful explanation or aftertaste. Still, it’s an arresting exercise in competing female willpowers, contrasting de Funes’ open, searching appearance against Baker’s Gothic witchiness, Valentina early on asserting her sexual self-determination, and thereafter fighting to retain the power of the look against a reality perpetually disrupted by fantastic visions (paralleled by how the film itself is regularly disrupted by series of still photographs or comic book frames, or in one instance by a sudden digression into gangster action, which turns out to be the aforementioned commercial shoot).

The Palace (Roman Polanski, 2023)

 

Roman Polanski’s The Palace is at once anarchic and exhausted, familiar-seeming while aggressively withholding much fulfilment, let alone closure: its relentless ugliness and complete absence of eroticism jarringly contrasts with What?, perhaps its closest cousin in Polanski’s oeuvre, but one in which its lead actress Sydne Rome was almost constantly completely or partially nude (as if to underline the point, Rome briefly shows up in The Palace too, far less strikingly). The film partially draws its ruined mood from being set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, with some characters believing the Y2K bug will strike and do its worst, others oblivious to it; the film reminds us that it was also the day of Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, providing clips of an impossibly benign-seeming Putin on his first day of succession. The film seems to suggest that the end of the world, or at least this corner of it, might be a proportionate response to humanity’s dreggy state: virtually every wealthy female face (and at least one male one) made grotesque by plastic surgery; one off-putting display of entitlement and obliviousness following another; rampant financial corruption; a degraded focus on petty whims and indulgences. But of course the end of the world fails to arrive, and the same goes for narrative closure: the film’s most intriguing structural element is its open-endedness, perhaps suggesting that one layer of idiocy will always be replaced by another, perhaps implicitly chiding the audience for even hoping to extract superficial clarity from such underlying wretchedness. Still, the point would probably have been better made by more sprightly writing and handling, for example with less focus on human and animal excrement, and with more energetic casting (for instance, the no-longer-funny John Cleese achieves little as an ancient Texan billionaire, although his performance gets more enjoyable once his character dies and starts getting lugged around in the manner of Weekend at Bernie’s).