Dir.
Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Belgium/UK/Germany, 2006, 145
mins
Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman
Review by Philippa Bradnock
Paul Verhoeven is
not usually associated with period drama. Previous films
like RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls and
Starship Troopers cast the director as a 'girls n' guns'
kind of guy. It is a surprise, therefore, to find that
Black Book deals with the story of Rachel Steinn (van Houten),
a young Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Holland. She is enlisted
by the Resistance to adopt a new identity as Ellis de Vries
and seduce a top ranking German security service officer,
Müntze (Koch). But he turns
out to be rather charming and she finds herself questioning
her allegiances.
Black Book comes with a clutch of
film festival awards and nominations and is being touted
as a 'comeback' for Verhoeven. But in spite of these cultural
credentials and worthy plot, it retains the director's
trademark – over-polished
visuals and queasy sex and violence preoccupation. Black
Book wants to believe it's a cinema great, and minor characters
compare Ellis to Betty Grable and Greta Garbo. Unfortunately
these references only expose the contrast between the Hollywood
stars' charisma and van Houten's one-note performance here.
To be fair, it isn't entirely her fault; the film fails to
convince on many levels, and van Houten just provides the
focus for its shortcomings.
Black Book presents Ellis as a confident and sexually assertive
woman, willing to go as far as it takes for her country.
It even nods to the gender issues inherent in women's appropriation
of the male space of wartime heroics. But it soon becomes
clear that these traits are not designed to present an emancipated
and self-directed personality, but to give us a lot of opportunities
to see her tits. In one scene she dyes her hair and pubic
hair blonde to go under cover, allowing Verhoeven a lengthy
crotch shot. Fellow Resistance fighter Akkermans (Hoffman)
arrives, they banter about her efforts and the scene moves
drearily and repetitively into soft-porn territory as he
rips off her dress.
Verhoeven's sex scenes always play like near rape and these
sequences feel enormously exploitative. The film repeatedly
humiliates Ellis while insisting that she really doesn't
mind, actually, she probably quite likes it.
More disturbingly, post-liberation scenes of nudity are
presented similarly. So a nasty scene where Ellis is (again)
forced to undress in a collaborators' prison and then showered
in excrement for the amusement of drunken onlookers seems
to be as much for audience titillation as for theirs. Van
Houten's function is to look pretty, do little and get horribly
abused in the name of patriotism and pluck.
Black Book runs at over two hours long but rushes inexorably
along like a breathless child explaining a sequence of events.
It all becomes increasingly incomprehensible as it careers
onwards and relies on lengthy exposition in the dialogue
to fill in what we missed between scenes. There are few outdoor
sequences and everything has the flatly overlit, antiseptic
feel of a TV movie.
The simplistic relationships and the frequent reference
to our small group of characters as 'the whole of the Resistance',
give the distinct impression that in Nazi Holland there were
maybe three Nazis and five members of the Resistance.
No one seems particularly good at their job either. Ellis
messes everything up relentlessly and is forever telling
people that she's a spy. The Nazis are barely more convincing,
with their odd workplace bickering and cardboard good Nazi/evil
Nazi rivalries. It starts to feel like this was really about
an inexplicably violent squabble within a group of jovial
Boys' Own characters who happened to live on a film set.
There is little sense that anything is really at stake.
There are plenty of wartime adventure stories but it seems
disingenuous of Verhoeven to maintain any kind of basis in
historical fact for this film. The semi pornographic flavour
of many scenes also seems particularly ill judged when linked
with such claims. Black Book is just Basic Instinct or Showgirls
in the 1940s. Verhoeven and fellow scriptwriter Gerard Soeteman
worked for 20 years on this film, and took 17 to come up
with the idea for a female lead. I just hope they got some
other things done during that time as well.
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