Beyond the Multiplex

Verhoeven's "Black Book" is an outrageous tale of vengeance, treachery and sexual desire. Plus: Duchovny and Weaver play for laffs.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Nazis, David Duchovny, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Sigourney Weaver, Independent Film, Reviews, Paul Verhoeven, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Sebastian Koch and Carice van Houten in "Black Book."

April 5, 2007 | Before Paul Verhoeven became an infamous Hollywood provocateur of the '80s and '90s with lurid, slippery spectacles like "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls" -- and before he became the apparently washed-up former provocateur of the 2000s -- he was just a Dutch film director. Mind you, his earlier films, like the Oscar-nominated "Turkish Delight," the motorcycle drama "Spetters" and the thriller "The Fourth Man," were just as sexual, nearly as violent and absolutely as weird as his later output. But because they were made on low budgets in a small European country, they were art films, virtually by definition.

Now, seven years after Verhoeven's American career hit its low point with "Hollow Man" -- the dullest and least personal of all his movies -- he's a Dutch film director again. "Black Book" is a convoluted yarn packed with intrigue, lust and betrayal, set against the last years of World War II and its aftermath. It simultaneously revisits the actual setting of Verhoeven's childhood (he was 2 years old when the Nazis invaded Holland, and 7 when they left) and the themes and archetypes that have possessed him ever since. It's a messy, colorful big-screen entertainment that veers from sober period piece to outrageous melodrama, which is to say it's a Verhoeven movie. If it's something less than the grand masterpiece his fans might have hoped for, let's remember whom we're talking about.

I think Verhoeven is an underappreciated cinematic master, but the reasons for his lack of stature are partly of his own creation. Even his best pictures (I would nominate "Basic Instinct," "Starship Troopers" and probably "The Fourth Man") are always conflicted, at war with themselves, undermining their own integrity and coherence as they go along. "Black Book" is like that too. It begins as if it's going to be an ordinary, respectable World War II costume drama, with heroes and villains in the right places and wearing their familiar uniforms. (As one friend of mine put it, at first it appears to be sane.) But the veneer of normalcy falls away pretty quickly, and we've got a tale of bloody vengeance, despicable treachery, inescapable historical irony and, above all, inappropriate and uncontrollable sexual desire. Woo-hoo!

According to Verhoeven and co-writer Gerard Soeteman (also his collaborator on seven previous films), the events in "Black Book" have been rigorously researched and stick close to historical fact. They've been trying to bring this ambiguous portrait of the Dutch resistance, and its complicated back-channel relationship with the occupying German forces, to the screen for more than 30 years. In fact, "Black Book" is half-intended as a companion piece to Verhoeven's 1977 film "Soldier of Orange," which portrayed the student-led Dutch resistance in heroic primary colors. This film views the same period through a cloudier prism, one more consistent with Verhoeven's vision of the world (and also, we might say, closer to the murk of actual history).

Our heroine is another of Verhoeven's ice-blond bitch-goddesses, or at least she turns into one as the movie progresses. She certainly has her reasons, and you can almost feel the director battling manfully against the charges of misogyny that have followed him throughout his career. Rachel Stein (played by the diamond-bright Dutch actress Carice van Houten) is the daughter of an affluent Rotterdam Jewish family who are ambushed by a German gunboat as they try to escape across the marshes into Allied territory. Rachel alone escapes, and watches impassively from a hiding place in the reeds as her parents and siblings are killed and their bodies ransacked for money and valuables.

Verhoeven has always been a fine director of action scenes, but the horrific scene is presented almost matter-of-factly: The Germans are following orders and Rachel is trying to survive, that's all. The obvious emotional trauma is all but invisible. This may well be true to actual wartime experience (as in, say, Roman Polanski's "The Pianist"); most of us, thankfully, will never know. Verhoeven has often spoken of being forced to walk past the bodies of executed resistance fighters, as a small child in the Hague. What emotions could he possibly have felt, beyond the urge to look elsewhere and think about something else?

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