#I've low-key been crushing on Virginie Efira for more than a decade

[eagle-raider]

Directors are really riding the wave of lesbian Gothic drama, I see. Case in point with what is shaping up to be a crossing between Blue is the Warmest Color for the gracious nudity shots and The Handmaiden for the atmospheric ambience, but sadly, it holds none of its clever plot weaving and beautiful photography.

GAY NUNS ARE GAY, also known as Benedetta

Under the cut, because I’m ranting.

It’s been selected for the official competition (not exactly the best lineup of movies, Cannes’s most memorable films, save for a few exceptions, are usually found in the parallel competition: Un Certain Regard) and it’s coming out in July. 

Like three out of four lesbian movies that made it to the official competition of Cannes’s Film Festival in the past 8 years (Blue is the Warmest Color, Carol and the Handmaiden), this one is based on a book written by a woman: Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (oof) by Judith C. Brown. 

It tells the real life of Benedetta Carlini, an Italian woman who grew up in a convent and became an Abbess after she started having visions of religious (and sexual) nature. It is the earliest documented trace of female homosexuality in the Western world. 

Now, I saw a trailer. I usually avoid them like that plague when they’re more than two minutes long because then, they give everything away. This one was one minute fifty seconds, which entered within my self-imposed limit.

I shouldn’t have done that, because now I feel that I have seen everything: Virginie Efira having gay panic, lots of boob shots and an ‘o’ face under the candlelight. Oh, and there’s something nebulous about a prophecy? I think? I didn’t quite get it with since the editing was intent on shoving boobs and mysterious shots of naked women behind a see-through veil. Oh, and awesome Charlotte Rampling speaking French with her cute accent. 

Now, this could be a very interesting movie, it has the potential and the material to be. But when a director feels the need to have a falsely mysterious trailer that is so pretentious that it’s borderline cringe, when a director has so little faith in the quality of his work that he feels the need to grab your attention with the cheapest hook ever (female pleasure seen on camera, oh so very scandalous! Much subversive!) for his trailer to make an impression on you... yeah no. 

And you guys, I’m French. I’m not bothered by nudity, I’m that weirdo who went and watched Blue is the Warmest Color at the cinema with a bunch of (girl) friends. Yes, we sat through those seven minutes when other people were storming out. I have mixed feelings about that movie as well, but that’s for another time and a different matter altogether. I will say that though: it did capture the all-consuming and destructive passion of what first love (usually) is. Adèle Exarchopoulos’s performance is genuine, raw and painfully realistic from the beginning to the end. She deserved every accolade and even more. 

Nudity and sex in cinema don’t bother me. Violence and abuse do because it’s so engrained in mainstream media now, that nobody even bats an eyelid anymore, especially when it’s directed towards women. We’ve become so desensitized to it and it’s so very dangerous.

But this trailer? I’m just wondering... why? Why all of this? Why so many shallow sequences? We got it, she’s horny and they’re going to have steamy crazy sex in *gasp* a convent. Great. The director, Paul Verheoven, could have conveyed that in so many - and more impactful ways... You know what Park Chan-wook did to show all of this without actually showing any of it in the Handmaiden’s trailer?

He had the actress breathe at the beginning of the trailer. He used the music, the beat of percussion and electronic instruments go crescendo along his editing, like an orgasm. He had close-up shots on their ankles and the curve of their shoulders, and their hands. Hell, the music he used is called Red Sex (by Vessel). Now that’s suggestive, that’s explicit, that’s subversive.

It was so freaking well-executed that the MPAA (the prudes of America) gave it a green rating. A Park Chan-wook movie trailer. The same guy who made Old Boy. There’s only one trailer for the movie, and it’s this one. Foreign movies usually have at least two: the international trailer (usually made for the USA market) and one for the country of origin. This one doesn’t, because it doesn’t need to.

It’s everything that Benedetta’s trailer isn’t. Benedetta’s trailer is a freaking bulldozer that does absolutely nothing, a wet firecracker that tries too hard to be edgy. Why hide your movie under boobs and painfully fake moans?

Damn, I wanted to look forward to it. I so wanted to, but it feels like the director is hoping the nude shots and simulated scissoring will distract the jury long enough for them to give him a prize. Heh.