Benedetta/Quo Vadis, Aida?

Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films 
UWA Somerville  

By Wolfgang von Flugelhorn

‘Are all his films like that?’ my friend Sister Angelica of the Order of the Second Coming asked as we lounged back in our deckchairs at the Somerville open air auditorium while the credits rolled at the end of Paul Verhoeven’s latest opus Benedetta about the eponymous 16^th century lesbian nun and self-proclaimed visionary.

 

‘Yes,’ I replied. At least this was true of the ones I’d seen. The Fourth Man, Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, Elle: all different genres (mostly thrillers or sci-fi) and made in different countries and cinematic contexts (the Netherlands, Hollywood, France); but all featuring graphic sex and violence; all with a comic-book visual and narrative style; all with an underlying level of socio-political satire; and all focussing on bodies and flesh, either glistening and golden or being pulverized or ripped apart.

 

‘But why did he make us watch the two nuns having sex like that with the dildo carved out of a statuette of the Virgin Mary?’ asked Sister Angelica, referring to one of the scenes between Benedetta (Virginie Effira, the apparently tolerant wife of a serial rapist in Verhoeven’s previous French film Elle) and her lover the novice Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia). ‘It was all from the point of view of the male gaze. Perhaps that was intentional, but I didn’t get the point.’

 

True, I reflected. Verhoeven would probably be the first to admit that the scene was indeed shot from the perspective of the (or at least a) male gaze (his own); he might even ask what other perspective he could possibly have. He might also point out that the scene is actually watched through a spyhole by the gaze of another female character (albeit a gaze he himself has imagined): the Abbess (Charlotte Rampling, who has two of the best lines in the film, ‘Miracles never happen in bed’, and ‘I didn’t want her to die – at least, not so quickly’). This might raise a series of further questions: to what extent are female and male fantasies fundamentally different or (paradoxically) the same; to what extent are Verhoeven’s characters (regardless of gender or sexuality) versions of himself; and what’s the relationship between the respective gazes of the characters, the director, and the film’s spectators (male or female, queer or straight)? All of which are questions that Verhoeven might enjoy provoking us with.

 

‘But why did it have to be so violent? I mean, the torture scene with that hideous instrument…’

 

When I last met up with Paul for a beer in Amsterdam in early 2020 he told me how much fun he had growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland during the Allied bombardments of V1 and V2 rocket launching sites near where he lived with his parents in The Hague. He said it was all a big adventure, but he also mentioned seeing burning buildings and mutilated corpses in the streets and acknowledged that his wartime experiences were probably the source of all his films. As for Benedetta, he simply referred matter-of-factly to the violence that was perpetrated against women in early 17^th century Europe and said that the torture inflicted on Bartolomea under the supervision of the Papal Nuncio (a deliciously over-the-top Lambert Wilson) reflected the misogyny and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. In the same vein, he pointed to the actual existence of police brutality in the United States (which was fetishized in films like Lethal Weapon) when people objected to the ‘excessive’ violence in Robocop. 

 

‘But feels like he’s having his cake and eating it too. I mean, he’s criticising or satirising violence, patriarchy and the male gaze, but he’s also perpetrating and enjoying it.’

 

It’s true that watching a Verhoeven movie is a guilty pleasure. You could say that they all deal with pornography (sexual or violent), propaganda (political or religious), and the relationship between them, both in terms of overt content and underlying form: how are pornography or propaganda communicated; and how are they seen (or not-seen)? However his films are also undeniably exciting, sexy, scary and funny, at least to his admirers. A hilarious example of this is the TV military recruitment ads in Starship Troopers, which show glimpses of violence and glamorous troopers, and end with the teasing refrain: ‘Would you like to know more?’ I guess you could say that his films are pornographic, and even propagandistic, perhaps unavoidably; that that's an essential part of their problematic pleasure.

'Like a child being excited by explosions and body parts.'

Possibly. I wasn't sure if she was referring to Verhoeven or me.

 

‘But was he presenting Benedetta as a genuine mystic; or as someone with a mental illness; or simply as a faker?’

 

All of the above. It's true that her visions seemed more like fantasies or hallucinations, with cheesy content, acting, costumes, lighting and special effects; the miracles (including the statue of Mary that fell on her without crushing her, the appearance of stigmata, and her speaking with the voice of Christ) seemed increasingly fake; and her behaviour increasingly manipulative – displacing the Abbess, pursuing her affair with Bartolomea, and deliberately infecting the Nuncio with the plague (mind you, he deserved it). 

'So was he saying that she was a saint or a sinner, a psychotic or a psychopath?'

It's not a simple ‘either/or’. In the end, we don’t know for sure; which is surely appropriate. In fact many of Verhoeven’s films deal with the borderline between fantasy and paranoia. The ambiguity of Benedetta’s visions and miracles resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger’s adventures in Total Recall (as he says in the last line of that film, ‘If this is a dream, you’d better kiss me before I wake up’); not to mention the delusions and hallucinations that afflict the bisexual writer in The Fourth Man, a film which deals even more explicitly with the connection between sex, violence, Catholicism and psychosis. As Paul remarked to me at our last meeting in Amsterdam, ‘Christianity is a symptom of schizophrenia affecting half the world’s population’. (I didn’t mention this last remark to Sister Angelica.)

 

As my old friend and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (who saw me for a few sessions in Paris before his death in 1981) said about Bernini’s statue of Saint Teresa of Avila being pierced by an angel with an arrow: ‘She’s coming, there’s no doubt about it.’ But how could he (or for that matter Bernini) know for sure? Lacan also said that mystics experience ecstasy without knowing or being able to say anything about it; and that women are able to experience a ‘surplus enjoyment’ unavailable to men; but really, how could he know that either? Only Tiresias (who according to Greek myth experienced lovemaking as both a man and a woman) could know that; and Tiresias was, precisely, mythical. 

However, I decided not raise any of this with Sister Angelica, and to postpone any theological discussion of the Second Coming to another time. 

 

*

Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida? ­– which we saw at Somerville the following Monday – is a very different film from Benedetta in terms of genre and style. However it also features a central female character navigating a violently toxic masculine environment riven by religious (or more precisely ethno-nationalist) prejudice. A fictional account of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces, it might be described as a war movie that focusses on the impact of war on civilians rather than combatants. As such it resembles the kind of neo-realist work (in a lineage stretching from Rossellini to Paul Greengrass’s United 93) that Verhoeven never made about his own childhood. 

 

Žbanić grew up in Sarajevo and was a teenager there when the city was under siege during the Bosnian War. Her previous films Grbavica and Na Putu (On the Path) are set in her home city in the aftermath of the war, and focus respectively on a single mother and victim of the systematic rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serbian soldiers, and a young Bosnian Muslim couple trying to find their way in post-war Bosnian society. The eponymous hero of Quo Vadis, Aida? (a searing performance by Serbian actress Jasna Đuričić) is a Bosnian Muslim translator working for a Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion during the siege of the town of Srebrenica by Serbian forces. The plot focusses on Aida’s attempts to save her husband and two sons from the impending massacre, in which an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were rounded up and shot by the Serbs, while the UN forces failed to protect them.

 

The style of the film is lean and economical, with virtually no soundtrack music or onscreen violence. Even the massacre itself when it inevitably comes is depicted by the image of machine guns poking through window slits into a town hall and firing, without showing the impact on the bodies of the men and boys we have just seen cowering inside, in an almost textbook example of Eisensteinian montage. The next, almost equally telling shot shows people in the square outside the hall going about their business apparently unmoved by the sound of gunfire. 

 

Complicity rather than savagery is in fact arguably the real subject of the film. On more than one occasion I was reminded of my old friend Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’: for example when the Serbian commander Ratko Mladić (played with chilling calm by Serbian actor Boris Isaković) tosses bars of Toblerone and cans of Coke to the crowd of refugees inside the UN compound to reassure them of his good intentions and encourage their cooperation. 

 

However for me the most potent images came in the final reel when Aida returns to live and work in Srebrenica as a schoolteacher after the war has ended. Bulldozers are seen digging up piles of earth in the town square; in the next shot, we see Muslim women (Aida amongst them) inside the hall wandering among rows of human bones and items of clothing. Finally Aida collapses beside a collection of bones and clothing, and we recognise a pair of sneakers that we saw one of her sons putting on at the start of the film. 

In another scene, she passes a man carrying bags of groceries on the stairs leading to her old apartment; he says hello without looking at her, and she recognises the face of a Serbian soldier we saw bullying his way into the UN compound before the massacre. We see his face again in the final scene: a proud parent watching his child in a performance at the school where Aida is teaching. 

Such images demonstrate Žbanić’s mastery of visual storytelling and condensed but complex meaning. There are no easy answers or consoling messages in this film. The massacre happened because no one stopped it. Life goes on, but justice or forgiveness remain open questions. Mladic was convicted as a war criminal and sentenced to life imprisonment; and the Dutch Government accepted some responsibility for their failure to protect the civilians supposedly under their care; but thousands of perpetrators were never charged, and denialism is still widespread.

 

As the credits rolled, I asked Sister Angelica about the title. She explained that it comes from the Latin words ‘Quo vadis, domine?’ (‘Where are you going, lord?’), which according to tradition were spoken by Peter when he was fleeing persecution in Rome and encountered the risen Christ. The latter answered, ‘I am going to Rome to be crucified again’, whereupon Peter went back to the city to continue his ministry and was crucified upside down. 

 

I thought of Aida, going back to Srebrenica to continue her ‘ministry’ as a teacher and being ‘crucified again’. 

I asked Sister Angelica about the doctrine of the Second Coming, and she answered quietly, ‘It happens all the time.’

 

*

 

Benedetta screened from Mon 3 to Sat 8 February, and Quo Vadis, Aida? is currently screening until Sat 15 February at UWA Somerville as part of Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films.  

 

Wolfgang von Flugelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flugelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flugelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Sein Unzeitlich (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.