Black Book

“Black Book”

Netherlands. 2006. Directed by: Paul Verhoven. Written by: Paul Verhoven and Gerard Soeteman. Starring: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman and Halin Reijn.

Rating: ★★★½

After the new wave of WWII films that have attempted to deconstruct the hellish brutality faced by men on the battlefield, Paul Verhoven has created a more old-fashioned throwback to the stylish, elegant historical epics of yesteryear in the form of “Black Book.” Mixing in thrilling excitement and luminous feminine charm, this complex, ambitious story of a Jewish woman who uses braves and smarts to survive should engross audiences into a little explored chapter of WWII.

Verhoven has been working towards this movie for almost 20 years while making Hollywood films (Robocop, Total Recall) with varying degrees of success. Those who know him only based on his Hollywood product would correctly think that he is a director who is not afraid to go into sheer excess with liberal doses of violence and sex. However, the films he made back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s in his native Netherlands displayed more restraint and still remain his best and after big-budget debacles such as Starship Troopers and Hollow Man, it was time for him to return to his roots.

In fact, this film works as a worthy companion piece to his brilliant 1977 WWII drama, Soldier of Orange, a story of the Dutch resistance’s significant patriotic involvement in the war against the Nazis. However, whereas that film presented a more positive portrayal of the Dutch resistance, Black Book paints its canvas with shades of gray among all sides – the resistance, the Jewish and the Nazi Germans.

Inspired by a true story, the film starts and ends with bookends involving a school teacher recounting painful memories in 1956 Israel. Within the central story set during the closing days of WWII, we are introduced to Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a Jewish woman whom we first see in hiding at the home of a devout Catholic family that makes her recite a Bible passage before eating her meal. All of that changes while she is flirting with a young fellow Jewish man when an air bombing raid wipes out her hiding place and that entire family. After narrowly escaping that and a massacre during an escape plan gone horribly wrong, she soon joins forces with the Dutch resistance.

Soon, the Dutch resistance put her on assignment to infiltrate a German army base that holds several of their comrades captive. Soon, she dons a new name, Ellis and uses her powers of seduction, particularly towards a German captain, Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch) to enter the world of the Nazi Reich so that her fellow resistance fighters can listen in on the Germans’ plan and hatch a rescue operation of their own.

Needless to say, the film takes far more intriguing twists and turns and it would be disingenuous for me to even hint at them. The film soon turns into more of a tense cloak-and-dagger story where she cannot know who to trust and even her own loyalties are questioned and endangered by others. Once we see all the character motivations, we are reminded once again of how the face of madness in war brought out the true colors of an individual – conniving and heartless qualities out of some we believe to be noble and yet sympathy and compassion from those we assume to be evil.

The thread that holds all this together is no doubt Carice van Houten’s fearless and tenacious performance. As a woman who doggedly perseveres and improvises to every situation, van Houten makes us feel and empathize with every horror and crushing defeat she suffers, including a moment when she is imprisoned, stripped and literally dumped on by a bucket of human waste. Being a musical actress in her native land, she is also a fantastic singer, which she shows in some fantastic jazzy numbers that serve as nice breathers in between the tense moments. Being only 29, she should benefit greatly from what will be her calling card for bigger and better things in Hollywood in the future.

The film’s cinematography is amazing to behold and the film’s production values are all first-rate. The film’s pacing moves quickly and effortlessly between moments of romance and sensual eroticism, and scenes of horrific violence and tension, including one that has a distant echo of another chilling Dutch thriller, “The Vanishing.” The only slight drawback is that Verhoven has still retained some of his Hollywood panache on his film and that glossiness somewhat takes away from horror of the situation.

That is a minor quibble for this sweeping epic film that leaves an indelible intellectual and emotional impact. The bookend resolution of the film ends with a siren going off in a Kibbutz, reminding us that there will always be some people in the world who will never escape the folly of war. And it takes a true heroine like Rachel Stein to keep one’s own sanity and composure through all the madness.