“Hot lesbo nun action” is a tawdry headline, but it’s definitely an accurate description of portions of Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, which screened at Park City’s Eccles theatre earlier today. I’m not saying Noivitiate is mostly or even partly an erotic thing (the real hot-nun Sundance flick is Jeff Baena‘s The Little Hours), but a certain scene during the final third…yowsah!

Novitiate is basically about various repressions (mostly spiritual) visited on a group of young women who’ve committed to be nuns-in-training, or novitiates. It’s mostly set in 1964, which is when various Vatican-led reforms, known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, were being implemented.

But don’t trust the The Sundance program notes, to wit: “This coming-of-age story is about a young girl’s first love. In this case, her first love is God.” The key term in this previous sentence isn’t “God” but “first love.”

Right off the top you’re going “hmmm, possibly an austere Robert Bresson-like film about the denials, devotions and disciplines of the life of a young would-be nun.”

The young protagonist is Cathleen (Margaret Qualley, 22 year-old daughter of Andie McDowell), and over the course of this 123-minute film “her faith is challenged by the harsh, often inhumane realities of being a nun,” etc. But sure enough, the old repressed-libido thing eventually kicks in and when it does, the axiom about “the stronger the constraints, the hotter the eroticism” comes to mind. I was sitting there watching a film about a nunnery, but the concept of “wood”…sorry.

I mentioned Bresson because Novitiate contains slight echoes of his passions and obsessions. He was not just a cinematic minimalist but a religious man of a conservative bent. He knew from austerity, spirituality and holding it in (i.e., Diary of a Country Priest). Except Bresson always cast his films with extremely good-looking, model-pretty actors and actresses. Sex never happened in his films, but it was certainly intimated in the features of his youthful players.

Here’s the thing — almost all the young women playing nuns in Novitiate are serious hotties. Qualley, Diana Agron, Liana Liberato, Morgan Saylor (White Girl), Maddie Hasson, Eline Powell — they’re all knockouts, and when was the last time you ran into even a half-hot nun or seen a picture of one?

Answer: Almost never. Retired actress Dolores Hart, who was quite attractive when young, is the only nun I’ve heard or read about who stands out in this regard. The actress who played a novitiate in Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Ida — Agata Trzebuchowska — was beautiful, of course, but that was a movie.

Novitiate is a reasonably well done thing, a little eccentric, a little Sundance-y but not half bad. The strongest supporting performances are from Melissa Leo as Reverend Mother (basically doing the same kind of thing that Meryl Streep did in Doubt, only with a heavier hand), Julianne Nicholson as Qualley’s skeptical, non-religious mom, and Denis O’Hare as an Archbishop pressuring Leo into adopting Vatican II’s more liberal “suggestions” about how to run things.

Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate is about various repressions (mostly spiritual) visited on a group of young women who’ve committed to be nuns-in-training, or novitiates. It’s mostly set in 1964, which is when various Vatican-led reforms, known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, were being implemented.

It’s a reasonably well done thing, a little eccentric, a little Sundance-y but not bad. And boy, does it have a hot lesbo scene in the third act! And this new Sony Pictures Classics trailer doesn’t even hint at this. Why, Michael and Tom? What do you have against lesbo tingles? Straight guys the world over eat this shit up, and you won’t even allude to it?

Right off the top you’re going “hmmm, possibly an austere Robert Bresson-like film about the denials, devotions and disciplines of the life of a young would-be nun.” The young protagonist is Cathleen (Margaret Qualley, 22 year-old daughter of Andie McDowell), and over the course of this 123-minute film “her faith is challenged by the harsh, often inhumane realities of being a nun,” etc.

The strongest supporting performances are from Melissa Leo as Reverend Mother (basically doing the same kind of thing that Meryl Streep did in Doubt, only with a heavier hand), Julianne Nicholson as Qualley’s skeptical, non-religious mom, and Denis O’Hare as an Archbishop pressuring Leo into adopting Vatican II’s more liberal “suggestions” about how to run things.

I’m not saying Novitiate is mostly or even partly an erotic thing, but that third-act scene…yowsah! The old axiom about “the stronger the constraints, the hotter the eroticism” certainly applies here. After the Sundance showing I asked around and everyone agreed this was the stand-out — trust me.

A day late, a dollar short: Just when a certain film snob was resentfully accommodating himself to the idea of two hot lesbo nun movies, along comes Paul Verhoeven to rub a third into his face. Blessed Virgin, which Verhoeven is currently shooting, will dramatize the life of 17th Century Italian nun Benedetta Carlini (Elle‘s Virginie Efira). The script is based on Judith C. Brown‘s “Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.” Are hot lesbo nun movies becoming a “thing” in the vein of ’70s women-behind-bars exploitation flicks (including Jonathan Demme‘s Caged Heat)? Back in the ’90s there was an understanding among Entertainment Weekly freelancers that that three of anything (Blessed Virgin + Novitiate + The Little Hours) constitutes a trend.

(l.) Blessed Virgin director Paul Verhoeven, (r.) star Virginie Efira during Elle photo at 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

Don’t tell Glenn Kenny but there were two hot lesbo nun movies at Sundance ’17 — Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, which delivers a single, highly affecting erotic scene in the third act, and Jeff Baena‘s The Little Hours, which I’m told was the “real” hot lesbo nun movie to see. Obviously more bawdy than “hot”. The Boccaccio-inspired comedy stars Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Kate Micucci, Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon. It opens on 6.30.17 via Gunpowder & Sky, which bought John Sloss‘s Filmbuff last fall.

The mock-tawdry headline of yesterday’s review of Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate read “Hot Lesbo Nun Action Toward The End.” That’s because the strongest, grabbiest scene in the whole film is a shadowy erotic thing between a couple of nuns-in-training. I asked around and everyone agreed that was the big stand-out moment — trust me.

But wait, hold on….there’s a Brooklyn perspective on this vein of hothouse cinema that demands consideration. Ebert.com and N.Y. Times contributor Glenn Kenny doesn’t like the term “lesbo” — he not only thinks it’s juvenile (which of course it is) but feels it’s important to strongly discourage its use even by those adopting a mock-ironic tone.

Kenny also feels that anyone who isn’t an elite foo-foo walking around with a feather quill sticking out of his or her anal cavity shouldn’t mention Robert Bresson, whom I referenced in my review because most of the costars in Novitiate are model-pretty in the vein of Bresson’s own casting tendencies. So he tried to give me a little bitch-slapping today, and I bitch-slapped his ass right back.

Hollywood Elsewhere has weighed in sufficiently, I think, about a certain aspect of Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.27). No need to beat a dead horse. The new SPC one-sheet doesn’t allude, of course. Their film, their sell. But if I were running the marketing campaign…

Last weekend two manly, fully mature critics, Joe Leydon and Stephen Whitty, took Hollywood Elsewhere to task for expressing garden-variety hormonal enthusiasm over what I carefully chose to describe as a “hot lesbo” scene in Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, or more precisely an erotic third-act scene between two lesbian nuns. Echoing the tedious viewpoint expressed last January by Glenn Kenny, Leydon lamented the adolescent associations with the term and more or less said that seasoned, worldly fellows with gray hair and commendable accomplishments should never go there. Whitty said roughly the same, arguing that “thinking like a man” means “not thinking and feeling like a boy.”

They don’t get it. When a truly erotic scene suddenly happens in the midst of an otherwise “decent but no great shakes” film, the blood warms up and the viewer is suddenly awake, alive and attuned. This is what happened when the Sundance audience saw Novitiate at the Eccles last January, and why everyone was talking about “that scene.” Leydon and Whitty can trot out their “tut-tut” and “harumph” routines all they want, but I was there. And if experiencing hormonal surges by way of a film are a mark of adolescent immaturity, and if denial or suppression of same is a mark of seasoned maturity, I’ll take the former, thanks. And if I choose not to mask said surges with harumphy, tut-tut terminology, that’s what many of us would call “acceptance.” Life is short, allow for the occasional gusto moment, let it in, etc.

Final remark to Leydon, Whitty: I didn’t write and direct the third-act lesbian scene in Novitiate — Margaret Betts did. If you have a problem with this sort of thing, take it up with her. I just sat down and watched it and shared what I shared.

The world premiere of Jeff Beana‘s The Little Hours (Gunspower & Sky, 6.30), a nunsploitation comedy based on a tale in Giovanni Boccacio‘s The Decameron, happened at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

I missed it by choice, although I did catch Margaret Bett‘s Novitiate, the other erotic-nun flick at Sundance ’17. But wait — I finally saw The Little Hours last night, or around 1 am rather, on the Macbook Pro. I did so in order to take part in a Little Hours press day starting at 3 pm.

The Little Hours is set in 14th Century Italy, but the actors all talk and behave like they time-traveled in from 2017 America. This is the basic joke — nobody’s really part of this realm, screw verisimilitude, pretending to be Italian nuns from 700 years ago will just get in the way, they’re just acting in Baena’s film for three or four weeks.

It’s not too bad if you don’t care that much. If you’re willing to just sit back, I mean, and say “fuck it…these guys are just goofing off, making a 21st Century American colloquial version as no one would pay to see a straight-faced version.” Or something like that. And they’re right — nobody would pay to see a 14th Century version.

The Little Hours Wiki synopsis reads as follows: “A young servant (Dave Franco) flees from his master (Nick Offerman) and takes refuge at a convent full of nuns.” Wiki doesn’t explain that Franco initially pretends to be “deaf and dumb”, and that he gets to boink most of the nuns. But he does both of these things.

The Little Hours runs 90 minutes, but — this is the interesting part — almost the exact same tale was told in ten minutes’ time in Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Decameron (’71).