smoke, most likely.
“Dangerous times call for
dangerous men,” says
Dumbledore ( Jude Law) in
David Yates’s Fantastic
Beasts: The Secrets of
Dumbledore, in which
everyone’s favourite Viking,
Mads Mikkelsen, replaces
Johnny Depp as the Dark
Wizard Grindelwald. Holed
up in his snowy lair, the dark
lord plots a race war between
muggles and the “pureblood”
wizards, by means of an
election at Berlin’s Ministry of
Magic. There, Grindelwald’s
thugs whip up the assembled
wizards with false-flag
propaganda and fabricated
assassination plots, while
Grindelwald smooths back an
errant lock of hair. Remind you
of anyone? All that’s missing is
the little moustache.
That’s right, it’s a wizarding
Third Reich, and while one
applauds JK Rowling for her
principled — if slightly late —
stand against fascism, you
have to wonder how much
it suits the demands of
children’s entertainment. I
had a lot of time for the first
film in this spin-off series,
Fantastic Beasts and Where
to Find Them, if only because
it finally quit Hogwarts to
explore the muggle world —
the friction between muggles
and wizards being the key to
unlocking the Harry Potter
franchise, as Steven Spielberg
realised when he was
approached to do the first
film. He was ignored, sadly,
and the rest is history. After
a brief spell in Brooklyn to
pick up Jacob Kowalski (Dan
Fogler) — the lone muggle who
is the spin-off series’s most
interesting character — the
new film, which was written
by Rowling and Steve Kloves,
reverts to the dazzling
creature effects, lumbering
plotting and wizard-on-wizard
action that has endeared the
franchise to the makers of
cash registers everywhere.
This one comes in at
142 minutes, only slightly
less than the time it took
Spielberg to liberate France
in Saving Private Ryan, which
makes it perfect for a car
trip to Wales with children in
the back, and while I enjoyed
Mikkelsen’s saturnine villain,
and the sight of self-pouring
coffee pots, Rowling seems
stubbornly oblivious to the
demands of those of us stuck
in the cinema, awaiting
movie magic. c
P
aul Verhoeven, aged 83, has
been invited to appear on a
Dutch TV show called What’s
Wrong with Tits? about why sex
has become taboo in Holly-
wood. As the provocateur
director of Basic Instinct and Showgirls,
Verhoeven knows a thing or two about
this. He giggles as he says the show’s
title — he has a puerile mind in a head
covered by white hair — but he wants to
make a serious point.
“Sex is the essence of existence!” he
exclaims. “Without it, there are no spe-
cies any more. So why is that a big
secret? There is a new purity.”
He made his new film, Benedetta, in
France and Italy to evade what he sees
as Hollywood censorship. It is the story
of a young woman who grew up in an
Italian convent and begins an affair
with a troubled new nun. She does
unorthodox things with a crucifix all
while having fevered visions of Jesus.
Like many of Verhoeven’s films it is
open to accusations of prurience — and
has been called a cross between Ham-
mer Horror and Carry On.
Verhoeven claims all the soft-porn
shagging is based in fact. It even has a
source: an academic book from 1986,
Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun
in Renaissance Italy by American scholar
Judith Brown. Still, there is no denying
that he thinks about sex a lot — the Hugh
Hefner of moving pictures. He has
incredible energy — sleeves rolled up,
always on the go. I’ve no idea how a
mind as erratic as his controls a film set.
Listening back to our interview, I find
sections seem lost (he goes off on a tan-
gent about lions) until, suddenly, he
jolts you with a genuine insight. He is
from a different era. But here’s the thing
— he often talks a lot of sense.
“Sexuality has been moved out of
movies,” he says. “In the 1970s you
could talk about it. But you arrive now,
decades later, and those movies are not
possible any more. It would be very dif-
ficult to make a film like Showgirls or
Basic Instinct now.”
Why the shift? He does not blame it
on #MeToo. Or even intimacy coaches.
He blames the Church and “the evan-
gelical thinking of the last decades —
that sexuality has to be family-orien-
tated. A man, woman, children.”
He mentions Mike Pompeo andback we go to sex. His next film will be
Young Sinner, an attempt to make an
erotic thriller like Basic Instinct in the
#MeToo era. It will be his first film to be
made in the US since 2000, when his
Invisible Man remake, Hollow Man,
turned sour and he absconded to Euro-
pean arthouse.
He is nonchalant about any fuss over
his previous films, particularly when it
comes to Sharon Stone, the star of
Basic Instinct. That film is 30 this year
and its most famous scene, in which
Stone uncrosses her legs, has never
been so scrutinised.
In Stone’s memoir she said she was
tricked into it, but agreed to keep it
because “it was correct for the film”.
Verhoeven says they still have a good
relationship. “We had no idea that shot,
showing a little bit of vagina — not more
than a stripe — would be a problem.” He
was surprised it even made the cut.
Who makes things now like Verho-
even used to? Squid Game had hints of
his brand — violence, social commen-
tary — but with erotic thrillers and fun
brainy sci-fi at a low ebb, there is a long-
ing for what he did. “It’s about crashing
and blowing up,” he says with a sigh of
big films. “Sometimes these movies are
fun, but the narrative tells you nothing
about us now. I don’t see any other
thought in Marvel or Bond movies.”
So what would Verhoeven do with
Bond? “I’d go back to reality,” he says.
“Cars that don’t leap up into the sky.”
He liked Casino Royale, but not the lat-
est instalment, No Time to Die. After all,
the latter had zero sex. “There was
always sex in Bond!” he cackles. “They
did not show a breast, or whatever. But
they had some sex.” cBenedetta is out on FridayThe director Paul Verhoeven has made a career out of being controversial
with Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Now he’s turning to lesbian nuns‘WE’RE SCARED OF SEX’
George W Bush and sees their beliefs
trickle from the top of society to the
bottom. In a surprising twist, he also
blames the Apostle Paul. “Lust that is
decadent and perverted? Paul said
that’s horrible and you will never enter
the Kingdom of God. Eurgh. I’m not a
fan of Paul. Although Paul is my name.”
If Verhoeven seems ridiculous, it is
because in many ways he is. He knows
it too. But he has led a learned life. Even
his interest in Jesus is based on experi-
ence. Aged 26 he was briefly a member
of a Pentecostal church and while now
an atheist, he knows his scriptures. He
has said he joined the Church at a
moment of “religious crisis” but he
walked out after less than two months,
disillusioned by all the talk of salvation.
Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam,
two years before the Nazis arrived, and
grew up near a German military base
with V1 and V2 rocket launchers.
Bombs were a daily reality and he saw
corpses on the street. For the first time
since his childhood, because of the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, he admits
he is scared about Europe.
His is not a one-track mind. Yet,JONATHAN DEAN
INTERVIEW
We had no idea
that showinga little bit of
vagina wouldbe a problem
Nun the wiser Daphné Patakia and
Virginie Efira in BenedettaMUBI FILMSALAMY10 April 2022 17