Benedetta, review: Paul Verhoeven’s story of a wild lesbian nun is as outrageous as you’d expect

How, in a biopic, might one go about telling the life story of Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century lesbian nun who became abbess of the Tuscan convent at Pescia, only to be stripped of her position and put in prison for having a well-documented affair with a fellow sister?

How anyone else might do it is moot. But Paul Verhoeven, director of Showgirls? Take a wild guess. Outrageous impudence and a winking relish for bad taste are more or less his religion. So, indeed, this film, unleashing orgasms so loud it’s a wonder the entire sisterhood don’t come a-running, is every bit the very naughty, Carry On Up the Convent romp you might salaciously imagine.

Loosely adapted by Verhoeven and David Birke from a 1986 biography called Immodest Acts, this is the director’s second French-language picture in a row after 2016’s rape thriller Elle, a project which thrillingly danced on the borderline between art and trash.

This is a bit more of an open-and-shut case, which is not to say that it isn’t intermittently, if not always convincingly, serious, too. Verhoeven zhuzhes things up from time to time between vigorous sessions of sex-toy action which uses – wait for it – a whittled statuette of the Virgin Mary. His film poses a lot of questions and prompts even more.

How did Carlini (an impressively passionate Virginie Efira) actually gain the top spot at this nunnery, despite the unrestrained Sapphic tastes herein ascribed to her? That’s (sort of) explained. Amid mystical visions of a seductive Christ and nightmares in which she’s violently attacked by would-be rapists, she reveals a nearly complete set of gory stigmata to her sisters. Evidence of the missing crown of thorns then shows up too – if it took a shard of broken pottery to clinch the deal, so be it. She’s hailed as a holy emissary, however disconcertingly mad her outbursts.

The outgoing abbess Sister Felicita (crafty-as-ever Charlotte Rampling) has her doubts, but then she’s a doubting figure in general, who runs the place as a business, emptying the pockets of the young Benedetta’s dad when she takes the veil.

Things are relatively sedate until the arrival of Sister Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia), a feral wild child begging to be rescued from the deeply unsavoury clutches of her father. You wouldn’t call this one cut out for a higher calling: she does a loud performative fart on the first night she’s inside, and from then on offers more carnal temptations than Carlini can possibly withstand. The first to intuit anything untoward is Felicita – of course, as Rampling hints by way of warning, a Reverend Mother always knows. Before giving away her office chamber, she digs a peephole through the wall, and it would be quite the understatement to say her suspicions are confirmed when she spots where the figurine is going.

Could anything be more Verhoeven than using a wooden Mary as a sex toy? A surprising amount of these details are historically attested, which must be what attracted him most to the material. The real-life Carlini, as this actually doesn’t say, claimed to be possessed in bed by the spirit of a male demon called Splenditello. In Verhoeven’s version, when she imagines disrobing Christ to caress him on the cross, he’s revealed to have a Ken-doll crotch, a moment (among many others) which seems semi-calculated to cause maximum offence in St Peter’s Square. Our girl isn’t disappointed in the slightest.

While the sex scenes aren’t numerous, they match Basic Instinct thrust for thrust in animal intensity, and if anything, they’re the film’s least ridiculous element, which wasn’t the case with Basic Instinct. True, only under a pretty lax interpretation of her chastity vow could Carlini spin all this as respectable abbess behaviour – she’s equally horny for Christ in her visions, but didn’t all this nun fun count as cheating on him?

What gave this pair cover, for a while, was the sheer bafflement back then that greeted the notion of two women having sex at all, and the specific mechanics thereof. As he’s proved numerous times by now, Verhoeven is well into it, with a female cinematographer (Jeanne Lapoirie) as his putative alibi this time against any charges of Blue is the Warmest Colour-style perving behind the camera. His two yet-to-complain actresses perform it more than credibly.

In its take on Carlini herself, Benedetta tips shamelessly down the exploitation route, but then shamelessness is thematically key to the whole enterprise. As she remarks to Bartolomea while masturbating, “shame does not exist under God’s love”, and all bodily expressions of her own love are, in their way, divine offerings. She certainly sets about trying to prove those assertions, even as the bubonic plague laps at Pescia’s gates amid cartloads of bodies, and a papal nuncio (Lambert Wilson) charges inside to put her on trial.

To an almost Name of the Rose degree, but with uglier cinematography, it gets messy and fraught in the convent, even before a vaginal torture device called the “pear of anguish” is whipped out to elicit a confession, and those orgasms turn to screams of agony howling down the corridors while Rampling vomits up blood. Brace yourselves.

Benedetta has the odd drab scene but is hardly ever dull, and only falters in playing a coy game about whether she was faking it or not – her faith, that is. She has a shard stashed handily about her person for any emergency stigma situations, though we never see her use it. This means Efira, good as she is, has to stay slightly opaque, juggling all the possible Benedettas from scene to scene while Verhoeven teases us about how mad, devout, or dissembling she may have been. Rampling, able to make total sense of her part, is strangely moving instead.

There are tiny moments of supreme hilarity, such as the latter’s expression when the nuncio’s pregnant concubine squirts breast milk in her general vicinity. As a statement, Benedetta won’t win any awards for coherence, but there’s just Too Much Verhoeven going on here for sensation hunters ever to feel short-changed.

Dir: Paul Verhoeven. 18 cert, 127 min. In cinemas from Friday