Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

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Cremildo
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Re: Paul Verhoeven

#2 Post by Cremildo » Sat May 09, 2020 5:51 pm

Benedetta will be released in France in May 2021, according to producer Saïd Ben Saïd.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Trailers for Upcoming Films

#3 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed May 05, 2021 11:11 am

Finally, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta

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Ribs
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#4 Post by Ribs » Thu May 27, 2021 11:07 am

IFC has bought Verhoeven’s Benedetta, another title surely to go on the queue along with the several we think are forthcoming likely gets from Criterion (they also have the new Audiard film).

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Finch
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#5 Post by Finch » Sun Jul 11, 2021 9:23 pm

ianungstad wrote:
Sun Jul 11, 2021 12:22 pm
Benedetta reviews were pretty mixed.
I find the hysteria over the sex scenes pretty tedious, and if by mixed reviews you mean Ehrlich's and Bradshaw's, I'm actually more intrigued by the film now because those two didn't like it. I also rolled my eyes at Peter Debruge describing it as a guilty pleasure. Slant Magazine and Ben Koenigsberg over at Roger Ebert.com were both positive.

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Never Cursed
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#6 Post by Never Cursed » Mon Jul 12, 2021 12:50 am

Finch wrote:
Sun Jul 11, 2021 9:23 pm
...if by mixed reviews you mean Ehrlich's and Bradshaw's, I'm actually more intrigued by the film now because those two didn't like it.
And here we have it - Ehrlich in particular engages pretty frequently in second-hand embarrassing critical stands. Who on earth trusts his opinion anymore?

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#7 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Jul 12, 2021 12:58 am

Hey he was a vocal supporter for Ema, so he’s cool with me

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Pavel
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#8 Post by Pavel » Mon Jul 12, 2021 2:06 am

I like his yearly Top 25 videos

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Never Cursed
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#9 Post by Never Cursed » Mon Jul 12, 2021 2:33 am

Broken clocks, &c, they don’t ameliorate his boosting of valueless prestige/pedigree garbage (Nomadland, Booksmart, Red Sparrow, I’m sure there are more). Maybe this is exclusive to me personally, but I also find his online presence in general pretty embarrassing as well, with his whole Paddington 2 bit being one of the dumbest I’ve seen a salaried critic run with.

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knives
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#10 Post by knives » Mon Jul 12, 2021 7:43 am

I adore his stances personally and find him one of the better critics in that mold of expressing first impressions.

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Professor Wagstaff
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#11 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Mon Jul 12, 2021 1:31 pm

Never Cursed wrote:
Mon Jul 12, 2021 2:33 am
Broken clocks, &c, they don’t ameliorate his boosting of valueless prestige/pedigree garbage (Nomadland, Booksmart, Red Sparrow, I’m sure there are more). Maybe this is exclusive to me personally, but I also find his online presence in general pretty embarrassing as well, with his whole Paddington 2 bit being one of the dumbest I’ve seen a salaried critic run with.
Not exclusive to you. I agree with your takes, and also find him to be a bully with far too much sway over other critics. I enjoyed a recent episode of LexG's podcast where he voiced these thoughts and took aim at DE's intellectual posturing, as well as discussing a recent (now edited) review of Infinite where he didn't realize Antoine Fuqua and F. Gary Gray weren't the same black filmmaker.

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Pavel
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Re: The Films of 2021

#12 Post by Pavel » Sat Oct 02, 2021 5:22 pm

Hard to properly assess a film like Benedetta because it's a toothless, facile satire that's also absolutely hilarious for practically its entire runtime. Only a few steps away from the "so bad it's good" category, but clearly intentionally featuring ridiculous scene after ridiculous scene (to describe them would be to spoil them). There's a certain respect I have for embracing full-on, bang-your-head-against-the-wall idiocy to such an extent and with such bravado, especially when the result is a non-stop blast. This is clearly just my attempt to find some sort of justification for an entirely superficial reaction. Whatever, it's a riot, and any version that's better would almost invariably turn out to be worse.

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Pavel
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Re: The Films of 2021

#13 Post by Pavel » Sun Oct 03, 2021 6:13 am

Pavel wrote:
Sat Oct 02, 2021 5:22 pm
Hard to properly assess a film like Benedetta because it's a toothless, facile satire that's also absolutely hilarious for practically its entire runtime. Only a few steps away from the "so bad it's good" category, but clearly intentionally featuring ridiculous scene after ridiculous scene (to describe them would be to spoil them). There's a certain respect I have for embracing full-on, bang-your-head-against-the-wall idiocy to such an extent and with such bravado, especially when the result is a non-stop blast. This is clearly just my attempt to find some sort of justification for an entirely superficial reaction. Whatever, it's a riot, and any version that's better would almost invariably turn out to be worse.
Having let this sit in my mind a day longer, I began to wonder if Benedetta is not a film at least partially defeated by the culture surrounding it. What is the role of such blatant provocation — and of supposedly transgressive cinema — in our contemporary liberal society? What's the point of telling an offensive joke if nobody will be offended? A film that's designed to shock and makes fun of religion while showing (relatively) explicit sexual acts will scandalize few people (all of them likely religious) and will have no trouble entering the broader cultural discourse. It would cause no controversy to have it selected for the most prestigious film festival in the world. A festival that gave its top prize to a film that's supposedly just as outré. I think that the moral progress we have achieved may have hindered provocateurs like Verhoeven. These things are no longer going to shock anyone — even the largest theater in Bulgaria (and I think Europe) had few walkouts and mostly an audience ready to laugh at every other scene. Truly transgressive cinema today shouldn't concern itself with what's acceptable on a moral level, testing what it can get away with doing without censorship. It should test the boundaries of the artistry — what can I do that people haven't before (but not because they weren't allowed to, but because they couldn't conceive it)? And I'm very much wrestling with whether Benedetta is a success on the level of imagination.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

#14 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Feb 27, 2022 1:27 pm

[Finally going through my ‘unreads’ and I guess this was never moved over from the Films of 2021 thread (posted 12/23/21)]

After Elle, I never expected that Verhoeven would thematically-best himself again, especially after the lukewarm responses to this film that seem to wildly misinterpret it as a safer, tamer work. What starts out as an amusing, light, and comical satire (complete with a scatological gag in its first act, that deceptively indicates this will be a skin-deep affair) gradually transforms into a seething deconstruction of the loneliness inherent in our existence. Verhoeven doesn’t provide the expected catharsis of a lesbian nun drama shattering conservative ideological customs through liberation, as I expected he would, but instead rejects the possibility of salvation through social means. The most devoted, collectivist-minded principals surrender their allegiances to higher orders for love, but only when experiencing pain unsupported by either spiritual or corporeal vessels. The lovers are not exempt, as they startlingly become sober to their limits out of self-centered fear or self-indulgent solipsism that segregates the duo from intimacy. Even if the saintly presences are true, that doesn’t prevent the isolation and neglectful tendencies to dominate relationships (that masturbation scene at the halfway point might be more subtle than any other sex scene, but it’s terrifying in its implications and consequences for all involved), reinforced through both social restraints and intrinsic obstacles, blocking the placement of faith outside of oneself or God onto another human being with a shade of trust.

Speaking of God, the presence of the unknown bewilders even the believers, and this enigma serves to destroy through confusion just as it does to desperately stabilize lost souls gravitationally-bound to psychological quarantine. The search for Truth is as futile and forlorn a quest as the loneliness of practicing Faith, including for the saint who seems to have all the power and self-actualized psyche- but we can detect instances where this breaks down as well, revealing the objective truth of God as meaningless in the milieu the characters inhabit. They are doomed to either blindly follow alone, despite the group presence, or engage in willful action apart from the norm and receive no release from this trek. If Huppert sublimated her corporeal powerlessness with reframed physical control in Elle, Efira does the same here only far less consciously, with higher stakes, and in a more nebulous playground, around a relationship with God. Or does she? Like Elle, there is maturely-drawn ambiguity as to the nature of what is happening, both in actuality and psychologically, but the observations of existential friction channel a plenitude of impetuses that cannot be ignored, and cumulatively contribute to the examination of devastating souls coexisting discordantly that Verhoeven is striving to communicate.

Although it's a welcome and frequently valid claim that God speaks through people and the energy we feel between them, I don't think Verhoeven's posited idea of corporeal love providing us access to God's universal love should be taken at face value. The evidence of disharmony in the midpoint's sobering scene is too strong, with the tragedy of mistrust taking a backseat to the tragedy of delusion in this being 'true' enough to stake one's life on. The satire doesn't feel as much against systems- though that's obviously present- as it is against mankind's universal straw-grasping for signifiers to fruitlessly provide tangible meaning to our lives. The climax might posture at celebration of collective subjective belief against the grain of what cannot be discerned, though this too appears to be born from anguished disorientation, and explodes into chaotic disturbance of withered psyches engaging in erratic behavior, instead of a lucid charge against patriarchal reign, which is another ruse. Narcissistic belief and fatalistic doubt continue to reign more strongly than any human force long after it's destroyed, and seals the fates of the already-isolated parties, even when together and physically 'free', separately in seclusion for eternity due to the determinist imprisonment of psychosocial division.

Hopefully others come to see this film for the dense exploration it is, and not the surface-level thematic regression it presents as to the naked eye. There's so much more happening below the tip of the iceberg.

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MV88
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Re: Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

#15 Post by MV88 » Sun Feb 27, 2022 1:55 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sun Feb 27, 2022 1:27 pm
Hopefully others come to see this film for the dense exploration it is, and not the surface-level thematic regression it presents as to the naked eye. There's so much more happening below the tip of the iceberg.
I think more people will come around to doing just that, as they have with quite a few of Verhoeven’s other films. The transgressive, in-your-face style that he’s known for has often caused a delay in widespread appreciation of his work, I think. I’m not saying that as a criticism at all, just as an observation of how he’s been evaluated over time. Elle was one of the rare exceptions in his filmography in how immediate its appreciation was. But from RoboCop to Showgirls to now Benedetta, I feel like his films have a knack for almost distracting the audience with what’s on the surface so they don’t notice the depth beneath it until they take a closer look, and of course given the nature of what’s on the surface, only a select few seem to be willing to do that. I’ve often wondered if the more externally lurid nature of his films is intended to be a sort of test that the audience must pass in order to gain access to what he’s actually doing.

It reminds me a little of what Roger Ebert said about Douglas Sirk. To paraphrase, he theorized that it took more effort to understand Sirk’s films than Ingmar Bergman’s, because whereas Bergman uses his style to highlight and accentuate his themes, Sirk uses his style to conceal them. Not that I’m comparing Verhoeven to Sirk in more than a superficial way, but I think the same principle applies to much of his work.

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MichaelB
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Re: Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

#16 Post by MichaelB » Mon Feb 28, 2022 7:06 am

I've never regretted my first Verhoeven being The Fourth Man (on its original UK release), because I can't think of any other Verhoeven film that's so explicit about laying out his working methods - the speech that Jeroen Krabbé gives to the literary society could almost be Verhoeven uttering his own creative credo. When my son discovered RoboCop independently, I made sure that his second Verhoeven was The Fourth Man (which he loved).

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The Curious Sofa
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Re: Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

#17 Post by The Curious Sofa » Mon Feb 28, 2022 7:39 am

MichaelB wrote:
Mon Feb 28, 2022 7:06 am
I've never regretted my first Verhoeven being The Fourth Man (on its original UK release), because I can't think of any other Verhoeven film that's so explicit about laying out his working methods - the speech that Jeroen Krabbé gives to the literary society could almost be Verhoeven uttering his own creative credo. When my son discovered RoboCop independently, I made sure that his second Verhoeven was The Fourth Man (which he loved).
I'd just moved to the UK when The Fourth Man came out and I remember it being an art house hit at the time. It's still one of my favourite films of his but it appears to have been forgotten about since. I watched it on DVD not too long ago and it still holds up, being offbeat, creepy and funny. Its on my Most Wanted Blu-ray-list.

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MichaelB
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Re: Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

#18 Post by MichaelB » Mon Feb 28, 2022 8:40 am

Sadly, five out of seven of Verhoeven's 1970s/80s Dutch films are currently trapped in "rightsholder wants commercially unrealistic fees" limbo, and that's one of them.

But the same applied to Jean Eustache's back catalogue until very recently, so fingers are tightly crossed.

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Matt
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Re: Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

#19 Post by Matt » Sat Dec 03, 2022 11:39 pm

Pasted from the “Who Gives Good Commentary?” thread:
colinr0380 wrote:Now that I know you like nunsploitation, I desperately want to know your thoughts on Verhoeven's Benedetta, Matt!
I can’t remember too much about it, though I’m sure I watched it within the last several months. I think at the time I wished it had gone further outré than it did, but I liked it just fine (and more than I did Elle).

[And I’m not actually much of a nunsploitation fan, or at least no more than the next person. Black Narcissus is in my personal top ten, and I’ll always watch The Song of Bernadette if it’s on, but that might be the extent of my fandom.]

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Re: Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

#20 Post by beamish14 » Sun Dec 04, 2022 12:03 am

Matt wrote:
Sat Dec 03, 2022 11:39 pm
Pasted from the “Who Gives Good Commentary?” thread:
colinr0380 wrote:Now that I know you like nunsploitation, I desperately want to know your thoughts on Verhoeven's Benedetta, Matt!
I can’t remember too much about it, though I’m sure I watched it within the last several months. I think at the time I wished it had gone further outré than it did, but I liked it just fine (and more than I did Elle).

[And I’m not actually much of a nunsploitation fan, or at least no more than the next person. Black Narcissus is in my personal top ten, and I’ll always watch The Song of Bernadette if it’s on, but that might be the extent of my fandom.]

It’s remarkable how faithful Benedetta is to the actual events depicted in Judith Brown’s Immodest Acts until the last 30 minutes or so, when the film takes an apocalyptic, Joan of Arc/The Devils left-turn. Some really hysterical dialogue, too. I love Benedetta humble bragging about god talking to her and skipping over others. It’s interesting to see an Italian story being depicted exclusively with French-speaking actors, although I suppose that’s not very different from, say, Hollywood adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ work

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