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Case of the provocative protege cast3/30/2023 ![]() The two young nuns collide in conflict and-inevitably-in a faith-informed, insatiable lust where little is left to the imagination. It is against this backdrop that Verhoeven and a ferocious Efira cast their most complex, and titillating, plot points.Īlso crucial to the film are Charlotte Rampling, as a mature abbess thwarted by her own lack of faith when faced with Benedetta’s increasingly dramatic and implausible encounters with Christ, and the 29-year-old Daphne Patakia, as the non-virginal Bartolomea, who enters the convent through sheer will. Likewise, she was only obliged to pledge ephemeral chastity, sans the usual eternal obedience to poverty. Benedetta’s family, while well-off, enrolled her in one where labor offset a portion of the hefty dowry. ![]() As Brown notes in Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, convents of the era were extremely competitive, prospective applicants far exceeding the number of available cells. Only this time, the testimony is a literal one, conveyed through the prodigious ascent and fiery descent of Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira), a pesciatine nun who was as cocksure in her betrothal to Christ as she was devoted to the blessings of sisterhood. Brown, the veteran director’s seventeenth feature, like a number of its precursors ( Elle, Black Book, and Showgirls among them), testifies to the tenacity, prowess, and castigation of the feminine. Adapted by Paul Verhoeven from a recondite sexuality studies text by feminist scholar Judith C. ![]() Though the film was delayed for several years, Benedetta’s Black Death setting is uncannily suited for the intrapandemic era. The freckle-faced Demoustier has played the ingénue for Robert Guédiguian, François Ozon, and Nicolas Pariser, but here she gives her most captivating performance to date. Thirty years Anaïs’s senior, Emilie, initially reserved around her new self-proclaimed protégé, soon finds the solutions to her own creative blocks between Emilie’s ears (and elsewhere). Instead, Bourgeois-Tacquet allows her young heroine a symbiotic chance encounter with a kindred spirit. She is quick to shirk her interpersonal and professional responsibilities to seek out Emilie for intellectual companionship, going so far as to take a job at a provincial hotel where the esteemed author is in residence for a writing conference.įrom the perspective of the parched American queer film critic, what transpires in the countryside is enrapturing-not because it is undeniably homoerotic, but also because it is allowed to unfurl with conversations absent intellectual pretension and without the queer introspection and label-ascribing that burdens many newer films under the queer and feminist cinema banners. ![]() While reading up on Daniel’s wife of many years, an author in her fifties named Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), Anaïs finds herself blown away by the older woman’s ideas and craft. Love is often found in proximity to trouble. The same is true for love it’s human nature to crave such intensity, despite the amorous conservatism that comes with age. Thus, she runs circles around herself, incensing her boyfriend by ending a pregnancy (after she forgets to take her birth control), and baffling her more mature paramour Daniel (Denis Podalydès) by rebuffing him sexually, noting that lovemaking makes her anxious.Īs a romantic comedy, Bourgeois-Tacquet's film is dependent upon a crescendo of chance collisions, each more provocative than the last. Preciously booksmart, ambivalent to adult responsibility, and charming beyond comprehension, Parisienne Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier) yearns for a love life that rivals the great affairs of the 17th century texts with which her PhD thesis is preoccupied. When well-executed, a thoughtful romp can say as much, or more, than pages of dialogue.Ĭharline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s first feature Anaïs in Love ( Les Amours d'Anaïs) is a film that prioritizes body language. Such carnal images serve a purpose: they have the power to illuminate and underscore religious hypocrisy, the pleasures and perils of childbirth, and unreciprocated love, and they can even permit, as in the case of competition entry Bergman Island, the spectator to time-travel between history and fiction. From Benedetta’s fire-and-brimstone affair to Anaïs in Love’s beachside romp, passion and its erotic trappings have been hard to avoid on the Croisette. ![]() Reporting from Playboy in 2019, critic Kate Hagen annotated that just over than 1% of the “148,012 feature-length films released globally since 2010 contain depictions of sex.” Fortunately, in critical dispatches from this year’s Festival de Cannes, this very quality has been breathlessly emphasized: passion and physical intimacy made an unapologetic return to the screen. The question of sex in cinema has been on the minds of many an American moviegoer in recent years, in large part because it is hard to find. ![]()
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