Review: Sexy, satirical and spiritual, 'Benedetta' shows a lesbian nun's life is not so wimple

In the first five minutes of "Benedetta," Paul Verhoeven's winking biographical fiction about the life and transgressions of a 17th century Italian nun, a bird defecates on a man's eyeball and a street performer merrily lights his farts on fire. It's gross. It's funny. It's oddly reassuring. Different directors have different kinks, and Verhoeven's taste for the scatological has been one of his auteurial signatures; he is, after all, the filmmaker who indulged a scene of rectal torture in "Soldier of Orange" and dumped a vat of feces onto his World War II-era resistance heroine in "Black Book."

And so no one should be shocked when his latest resistance heroine, Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira), and a fellow nun