Black Book

Bleak truths are a cur­ren­cy Paul Ver­ho­even enjoys deal­ing in. From the fight­ing and fuck­ing that coloured ear­ly work like Spet­ters, right down to the square-jawed Über­men­sch of Star­ship Troop­ers, he is dogged in his mis­sion to pro­voke, tease and offend by mak­ing the view­er seri­ous­ly ques­tion who they’re root­ing for.

Now he’s back on Dutch turf for the first time in 20 years, and the result, Black Book, is a delight­ful mélange of the qua­si-exploita­tion Ver­ho­even who pro­duced such rough gems as The Fourth Man and Sol­dier of Orange (which this film most clear­ly resem­bles), and the shrewd, cal­cu­lat­ed mas­ter of thrills who brought us Robo­Cop and Total Recall. This is a high­brow block­buster, but, as always with Verhoeven’s work, there’s a cru­el twist to be had.

Star-in-the-mak­ing Carice van Houten plays Rachel Stein, a Dutch Jew in Nazi-occu­pied Hol­land who, upon wit­ness­ing the mur­der of her entire fam­i­ly in an elab­o­rate sting con­coct­ed by the uproar­i­ous­ly wicked Nazi offi­cer Franken (Walde­mar Kobus), decides the best thing she can do is join the resis­tance movement.

There, whilst moon­light­ing as a cabaret singer, she falls in love with a sym­pa­thet­ic mem­ber of the Nazi top brass, an unwise move that thrusts her into a gulf of moral uncer­tain­ty, where a rig­or­ous ques­tion­ing of per­son­al affin­i­ty becomes a mat­ter of life and death.

Van Houten’s per­for­mance is almost wor­ry­ing­ly com­mit­ted, as she turns on a dime from sar­don­ic and sassy while fend­ing off the numer­ous sex­u­al advances of her male cohorts, to throws of gen­uine anguish when she is stripped and cov­ered in human shit as pun­ish­ment for her sus­pect­ed involve­ment in Nazi dealings.

More a thriller than a war movie, the action is still coloured by a sense of vivid his­tor­i­cal rec­ol­lec­tion (that of the director’s own youth) and rip-roar­ing, nar­ra­tive-dri­ven adven­ture. By turns vio­lent, sex­u­al­ly frank and deeply engag­ing, the plot twists bare­ly stop, even until the hor­rif­ic Plan­et of the Apes-esque finale, which forces us to realise that our plucky hero­ine is far from safe, while also ush­er­ing in Verhoeven’s almost duti­ful sense of moral needling.

But where a film like Star­ship Troop­ers wore its alle­gor­i­cal sub­text on its sleeve, Black Book seems the more stud­ied, insid­i­ous­ly bit­ter film as we leave the cin­e­ma in a state of dis­sat­is­fied sat­is­fac­tion; hat­ing our­selves for enjoy­ing it. For two hours we’re at the director’s total mer­cy, and boy does it feel good.