Almost two years after its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, and three after its making, it will finally arrive in Italian cinemas, thanks to Movies Inspired, the film that tells the (more or less true) story of Benedetta Carlini, abbess, mystic and visionary, accused of homosexuality and heresy.
We almost didn’t hope for it anymore. And instead, almost two years after its presentation in competition at Cannes Film Festival 2021and three and more from its realization, Blessed – the film “scandal” by Paul Verhoeven interpreted by Virginie Efira – will arrive in Italian cinemas, distributed by Movies Inspired from March 2nd next.
Extreme, provocative and ironic film like all the production of this great Dutch director, too free and clear-headed to please those who hold the purse strings in this contemporary industry that offers us cowardly and homogenized contents, Blessed tells a story that is trivial and sublime at the same time: the one – more or less fictionalized by the director, who was however based on the book “Impurous Acts: Life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy” by Prof. Judith C. Brown – of Benedetta Carlinia nun of the monastery of Pescia, in Tuscany, who in the seventeenth century was first considered a mystic and a visionary and then accused of homosexuality and heresy.
In the cast of the film, in addition to the Efira as the protagonist, there are also Charlotte Rampling (the abbess of the monastery), Lambert Wilson (an apostolic nuncio) and the young woman Daphne Patakiavery similar to Marine Vacthinterpreter of Bartolomea, the nun seduced by Benedetta.
To know more about the film, you can read the review written by Cannes 2001, while below is the original official trailer:
At the end of the 17th century, Italy was devastated by the plague. Benedetta Carlini enters the convent of Pescia, in Tuscany, as a novice. From an early age, she was noted for performing miracles. Her entry into the monastic community will radically change the lives of her sisters.
