Verhoeven revisits roots in tale of Dutch resistance
Wednesday, Aug 8th
American audiences may know director Paul Verhoeven best as a slave to excess -- a lot of it wretched -- from such spectacles of sex, violence and questionable taste as 'Showgirls,' 'Starship Troopers' and 'RoboCop.' The Dutchman was also behind Sharon Stone's infamous leg-crossing scene in the deliriously overripe 'Basic Instinct.' In the Hollywood pantheon, his is the perv oeuvre.
In Verhoeven's native Holland, however, he's better known as the director of such earnest -- albeit relentlessly randy -- pictures as 'Soldier of Orange,' 'Spetters,' 'Turkish Delight' (voted the best Dutch film of the century) and 'The Fourth Man.'
Depending upon how you look at him, Verhoeven is both the hero and villain of his own career.
Now after 20 years of horndogging around Hollywood, Verhoeven has returned to his darker Dutch roots with 'Black Book' ('Zwartboek'), a remarkable accounting of the heroes and villains fighting for and against the Dutch resistance movement during World War II. In many cases, they were the same people.
During the final days of the war, as the Allied army marched through Europe toward an all but certain liberation of Holland, the country's Nazi occupiers relied upon a bulwark of collaborators to hold back the resistance movement. But Rachel Stein (Carice Van Houten), a beautiful Jewish cabaret singer who is trying to avoid deportation to the concentration camps as 'Black Book' begins, has no interest in either side. It's only when her hide-out is destroyed by a stray bomb that she decides to flee.
With the help of a lawyer named Smaal (Dolf de Vries), she arranges passage to Allied territory, her name and all her possessions -- the sum of her life -- marked down in the attorney's little black book. When Rachel is reunited with her mother, father and brother just before making the crossing, she's hopeful that they'll never be separated again. But considering that the movie has two hours left to run, it's hard to share her optimism.
The Germans show up, but she manages a narrow escape, and with help from the resistance, makes her way back to the city. Bitter about what the Germans have done to her family, she decides to throw in with the underground, changes her name to Ellis and dyes her hair blond in order to look less Jewish.
Returning to the scene of one of his earlier triumphs, Verhoeven concocts another scene that revolves around a crotch shot, although it must be said, in fairness, that this one is at least plot driven.
Ellis has met Ludwig Muntze, an attractive Nazi officer, on a train. When her boss in the resistance realizes it is a high-ranking Gestapo officer (played by Sebastian Koch, from 'The Lives of Others'), he asks Ellis to sleep with him. Now that she's a blond on top, Verhoeven's gyno-cam records her effort to make sure that, as the English so delicately put it, the collars and cuffs match.
When she tries to describe Muntze to Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman), one of her comrades in the resistance, he tells her the Nazi she is about to go to bed with has murdered many of her countrymen. 'He seems like a nice guy,' she says, getting at the moral relativism that is the heart of 'Black Book.'
Verhoeven and his longtime writing partner, Gerard Soeteman, have constructed a jigsaw puzzle of shifting alliances and uncertain loyalties, in which very few of the characters are either all good or bad. Muntze, for one, isn't the usual Gestapo movie monster: He's a nice Nazi -- a handsome, cultured man -- and Ellis falls for him.
Can anyone who has risen that high in the Nazi ranks by 1944 be worthy of cinematic redemption? The movie makes it easier than you might imagine to ask that question, and more difficult than you might guess to swat it away. There was plenty of murderous duplicity to go around, and 'Black Book' serves as a corrective to the unblemished heroism of the Dutch resistance in his 1977 film, 'Soldier of Orange.' There is a traitor afoot in the underground, but Verhoeven and Soeteman nimbly keep us guessing who it is by making everyone look a little guilty.
Despite the picture's subtitles and its imposing 145-minute running time, 'Black Book' maintains a breakneck pace, pausing only long enough to raise some very interesting questions. The film has been structured in such a way that we know at least one important part of the outcome at the beginning. But that's the only reassurance Verhoeven is offering this time. The fate of these people is so often in doubt, it's hard even to be sure of what you already know.
`Black Book'
Mercury News Rated R (some strong violence, graphic nudity, sexuality and profanity)
Cast Carice Van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman
Director Paul Verhoeven
WriterGerard Soeteman, Paul Verhoeven
Running time 2 hours, 25 minutes
In Dutch, German, English and Hebrew with English subtitles