Lightning Round 4 (Patreon)

Although "lightning" may not be the best adjective here. I'm still finding it hard to view movies, as there is always some IKEA that needs my special touch with an Allen wrench. Also, one of the seventeen cats is always hungry. Anyway, here's where we're at.

Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021)

Truthfully, I checked this out for one reason only. A Letterboxd user whose taste I admire, Sarah Williams, placed it in her 2021 top ten. And while Censor is certainly flawed, I'm glad I took a chance on it. As I mentioned on Twitter, there are much worse things for a first-time director to do that pay oblique homage to Michael Powell and Atom Egoyan. The main problem with Censor, really, is that its ideas are so neatly laid out, as if it were offering itself up for future Women's Studies papers. Enid (Niamh Algar) works for the British censorship board, and the film takes place during two very loaded moments in British cultural history: the ascendance of Thatcher and the introduction of "video nasties" (i.e., low-budget DTV exploitation flicks) into a U.K. whose cinema had up until then been safely expurgated.

Bailey-Bond loads the dice here, since Enid is a deeply damaged individual who was somehow to blame for the disappearance of her younger sister when they were kids. Censor shows that this primal trauma both compels Enid to "get it right" when it comes to demanding specific edits, and serves as an open wound allowing the nasties to begin their infection. This is all a bit too tidy, as thematics go. But Bailey-Bond does do a fine job of depicting Britain as a society whose time-honored repression is always on the verge of viscous rupture.

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

I mean, the Catholic protesters aren't wrong, exactly. But I suspect it was the advance press -- "lesbian nuns! A Virgin Mary dildo!" -- that got their hackles up, when there's much more to be upset about than that. And more to admire, actually. Benedetta is a Film of Ideas cloaked in the habit of nunsploitation, and those ideas permeate the film in complicated ways. At first, we're given a crass, transactional view of the Church, with Mother Superior (Charlotte Rampling) demanding a dowry from young Benedetta's bourgeois father (David Clavel) as a condition for allowing the girl to take the veil. Benedetta is a fervent believer, with a passionate, personal relationship with both Jesus and Mary," and as we see her inculcated into life in the Order, it seems that her brand of faith is a disruption, something that threatens to compromise the place of the Church in Italian society.

And disrupt it does. As an adult, Benedetta (Virginie Efira) takes to heart the lessons of 17th century Christianity regarding Christ as the great martyr whose suffering we should emulate. But for Benedetta, pain and pleasure are strongly connected, since they are both sensations that force us to face the confines of our bodies, possibly to transcend them. So she "receives" (or blasphemously self-administers) the stigmata, as well as possessing a deeply carnal interpretation of her role as a "bride of Christ." Her sexual encounters with the novice Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) are triangulated through her religious fervor, thinking that she is communing with the young girl much as Christ (in her fantasies) communes with her.

Underpinning all this, as Verhoeven makes clear, is the fact that lesbianism as such had not been invented yet. The church elders remark on the unthinkable nature of the crimes Benedetta is accused of, and although they stop well short of making it explicit, these men seem to have a very clear idea of male homosexuality as a "possible" deviance. So if we acknowledge that queer sexuality has always existed in one form or another, Benedetta shows the intricate network of misprisions and self-deceptions that these women required in order to articulate their desires.

Oh, and I tried and failed to find a picture of the dildo. So we'll have to settle for the scene in which it is administered. Ad maiorem Mattress Gloriam.