Though raised in the Jewish faith in Argentina by parents who escaped Nazism in 1937, she has lived in the States since the age of 12 and observes rather than participates in any organised religion.īy way of counterpoint, she points to the very positive notices Benedetta gained recently in Australia. “I think they were hilarious,” says 75-year-old Brown of the protesters. Such a raunchy portrait of what goes on inside a nunnery caused a demonstration by devout Catholics waving placards about blasphemy and defamation when Benedetta premiered at the New York Film Festival in October. When you look at a number of his films the women may be self-fulfilling or self-destructive, but they are very active. “I would describe myself as a feminist,” muses Brown, “and I don’t know if this ‘male gaze’ is demeaning, but Paul is very sympathetic to women. “Nunsploitation” pronounced another, and complained of too much of the “male gaze” on women’s bodies with the convent’s buttoned-up habits and wimples regularly and casually discarded. “Saucy nun romance” with more than a hint of Carry On was the verdict of the Guardian’s critic after it was shown at Cannes last year.

The film is arriving in Britain on the back of mixed reviews. The Belgian actress Virginie Efira stars in the title role as the real-life, 17th-century Benedetta Carlini, mystic and Mother Superior who combines visions of consummating her marriage with Christ as a “bride of Christ” – as nuns were routinely referred to in Christianity – with a passionate affair with Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), one of the junior nuns in her abbey in Pescia in Tuscany. “It is,” Brown finally concedes, “a bit over the top.”

The most-talked about scene in reviews features a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary which is used as a sex toy by two nuns in a naked romp behind convent walls. “Paul always wants to push the buttons at the edges of things,” reflects Brown. There are arms plunged into boiling vats, the Inquisition torturing naked women, burning of heretics, plague and snakes being beaded galore, with the camera lingering on a good-looking Jesus on the crucifix as his loin cloth is removed. And, at 83, he has delivered much the same recipe in Benedetta. Verhoeven made his name in Hollywood with films such as RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995) by giving his audiences plenty of violence and erotica. “I went into the project as a consultant on the film with my eyes open realising that historians don’t have the copyright on history.” “Because it was Paul Verhoeven, I knew from the start that there would be quite a bit more sex in the film than if I were making it,” American academic Judith C Brown cheerfully reflects of Benedetta, the veteran Dutch director’s big-screen version of her celebrated book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.

Judith c brown immodest acts