This Week in Cinema (04.24.07)
WWII indie drama Black Book portrays life of an undercover spy in Nazi-occupied Holland
By Beth Capper
Published: April 27th, 2007 | 9:38am
If anyone manages to tow the line between foreign art-house films and heavily stylized Hollywood blockbusters, it’s Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. Getting his start in Dutch independent cinema before fleeing to Hollywood in the ‘80s, Verhoeven then seemingly altogether abandoned his native cinema, going on to make films like Basic Instinct and Showgirls.
Verhoeven’s new drama Black Book, however, finds him returning to his native language for a drama set in Nazi occupied Holland. Black Book is an independent film with a Hollywood budget, which makes for a sometimes confusing oscillation between a slick espionage thriller, chock full of explosions and replete with villainous bad guys and stunning, often naked, women; and a foreign language film attempting to seriously deal with the war and the motivations of both sides.
Black Book is told as one long flashback from an Israeli Kibbutz for WWII victims, where the film’s lead protagonist, a Dutch Jew named Rachel Stein, ends up after liberation. From there, the film goes back in time to the cusp of 1944, where Stein is found hiding out with a Christian family somewhere in rural Holland moments before an American bomber obliterates her hiding place from the earth. From there, Stein starts running, joining the resistance in Holland and soon finding herself undercover in Nazi headquarters, working for and dating the head of the Gestapo.
Black Book is definitely more Hollywood than art-house, and sometimes it’s hard to believe that Stein lives through attacks — with barely a scratch on her — that kill or at least maim everyone else around her. She’s one of those indestructible characters that you really only find in Hollywood narratives. Verhoeven also seems to struggle with how to depict his bad guys, where on the one hand he has the gross, overweight and almost comic bookish evil Gestapo general Franken and on the other, the sympathetic Gestapo head Ludwig Müntze, who helps Stein escape from prison when she is discovered by the Nazis.
If you remove the idea that Verhoeven is trying to portray history in Black Book, however, you’re left with a beautifully shot fast-paced thriller with compelling twists and turns right until its conclusion.
Issue #25
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