“It made me think of Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird, which is exceptional work, a real chef d’oeuvre.
“We are shooting a film about a woman who has her children taken away by social services,” she says. She currently has five projects on the go. As soon as her shoot finishes, she is heading back to Paris, where she lives with her eight-year-old daughter, Ali. “Isn’t this great?” she says, turning her laptop round to show me the view from her rented accommodation: a sunny vista over the sea. We are talking via Zoom from Brittany where Efira is working on her latest film, Rodéo. This meant there were a lot of moments when we couldn’t help laughing, even when trying to play something super straight, like when I was in a trance shouting: ‘Jesus, I’m coming … I’m all yours.’” So we were doing things that were obvious and not so obvious, with him insisting it didn’t in any way become melodramatic. “In all Paul Verhoeven’s films there is an ambiguity in the situations. Indeed, its harshest critics have accused it of “nunsploitation”, blasphemy and resembling a sleazy cross between Hammer Horror and Carry On.Įfira admits it was sometimes difficult to keep a straight face on set. Benedetta screams “sweet Jesus” as she orgasms, at which point the film threatens to plunge into parody. When not in a trance, performing minor miracles or saving the town from the plague, Benedetta is enjoying more carnal pleasures with Bartolomea, who introduces her to sex and carves a dildo out of her treasured wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary.
By now the devout Sister Benedetta, played by Efira, is 18 and plagued with bizarre, often erotic visions of a literally sexless Jesus whose loin cloth she removes. The sacred turns profane with the sudden arrival of Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia), a motherless girl fleeing her father and brothers’ incestuous abuse. Released in the UK later this month, the film is set in the Convent of the Mother of God in Counter-Reformation Italy, where Benedetta Carlini is admitted as an eight-year-old novice by the shamelessly mercenary abbess Felicita, played by Charlotte Rampling.
That is also a recurring theme in Benedetta, the latest French-language film from the RoboCop, Showgirls and Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven.
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