Parents' Guide to Benedetta

Paul Verhoeven's "nunsploitation" drama explores faith and belief and sex and violence in a way that rivals even his most controversial movies: Basic Instinct and Showgirls. He presents Benedetta in a surprisingly straightforward way, even kicking off with the claim that it's based on true events. Yet even as the film reaches high for powerful themes, it dives down below the belt into exploitation elements so silly they're shocking, and vice versa. There's an obsession with female breasts (the left one in particular) and obvious attempts at subversive imagery, such as the Virgin Mary statuette carved into a sex toy. And there are graphic, gratuitous sex scenes galore. Benedetta's visions of Jesus look like the painted covers of cheesy romance novels.

But Verhoeven has a point. The movie continually explores themes of faith in surprising ways. The first Abbess (Charlotte Rampling) insists that true faith can come only from suffering, and that suffering is something that one should actually pray for. Another nun explains that "your body is your own worst enemy" and "intelligence can be dangerous." All of these things seem to go against the very idea of life itself, and when Benedetta starts to gain power through her smarts and her seeking of pleasure, she seems to become something rather divine. In the 1970s, a subgenre that came to be dubbed "nunsploitation" attempted to clash strict religious beliefs with carnality, and Verhoeven does precisely that again with Benedetta, stamping it with his own unique style.