Black Book (2007)

Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a beautiful young Jewish woman, is on the run from the Nazis. It’s the Netherlands in the 1940s. She’s, basically by accident, joined a resistance group. By careless chance, a few of the group’s members, her de facto friends, have been captured. It so happens that Stein has met the man in charge of the region’s Gestapo. His name is Muntze (Sebastian Koch) and he’s taken a shine to Rachel, who’s known to him as Ellis de Vries. Like many a conflicted heroine before her, Rachel must infiltrate Muntze’s heart, and bed, in the fleeting hope that her friends can be saved, particularly before even more ruthless Nazi underlings can get to them.

The film is Black Book. The director is the Paul Verhoeven, returning after a long absence. If I recall correctly, the story theory people say that there are, once you boil everything down to its essence, only seven basic stories. I think the confused young woman in peril bedding an enemy superior against her wishes should be added as the eighth. It combines many elements of the other seven, but has any specific story been of more use to a filmmaker? The classic template is Notorious, and Ang Lee just made his best film, Lust, Caution, using the same scenario. Lee laced his Notorious cover with a bit of the obsession of Last Tango in Paris; and finally caught the movie that he seemed to be chasing for at least a decade. I was expecting Verhoeven to get all Basic Instinct on us and unleash a violent story of erotic bedroom gymnastics and purplish dialogue accompanied by even purplier score.

Verhoeven has and hasn’t made that film. Black Book is surprisingly, for him anyway, restrained in the sex and violence department. The story has, dare I say it, brought out the humanitarian in the filmmaker. Maybe it’s van Houten, one of the most startlingly beautiful women I’ve seen in a recent picture. Verhoeven has clearly fallen for his leading lady and that’s not particularly unusual, he falls for all of his leading ladies, but he doesn’t fetishize van Houten. He’s rooting for her, he respects her, and he clearly mourns the more outrageous and cruel things that happen to her over the course of the film. The trademark Verhoeven perversity serves him in a different fashion here; it dries out the potential schmaltz of the Wounded Survivor of a Historical Tragedy movie. Verhoeven is too much of a natural born filmmaker to bog things down in sanctimony. He wants to bare the tits and spill the blood as much as he ever did. But for once he sees the human cost involved in his spectacle. He hasn’t made his best film in Black Book, his masterpiece is still Robocop, but he’s easily made his best since then, a major comeback that erases the memory of the unforgivably boring Hollow Man.

The refreshing trick of Black Book is that it actually doesn’t commit to the story I just described, as over the top as the film can be, logic has more bearing here that you’d expect. The film isn’t a drawn out game of how long will it take Muntze to figure out who Rachel actually is. He’s fingered her (pun fully intended) by the time they’ve made love for the second time. The film doesn’t forget that a man in his position is, you know, probably fairly intelligent. Muntze doesn’t just let every single hot spy into his bed without so much as a question. He holds a gun to her, calls her on a coincidence, and before long, he’s holding her perfectly sculpted breasts again. Welcome to the return of the good Paul Verhoeven movie.

Koch, superb in The Lives of Others, and van Houten are invaluable here. I wrote a few paragraphs ago that van Houten is one of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in the movies. She’s also a sharp, charismatic actress, handling tones that turn on a dime with the ease of a seasoned pro. The most important thing though, is that you like her, root for her, and van Houten seems to sense this, because she doesn’t bend over backwards trying to appeal to your sympathies. van Houten’s performance is brave, commanding and unsentimental. Rachel is a survivor. As simple as that, this is a tough young woman, a warrior who happens to look like something too stunning, too naughty, to even appear in your inner fantasies.

Koch is playing the opposite of his character in Others here. Or is he? Black Book is more ambitious than you initially assume. The film is, first and foremost, melodrama, but the third act is a shockingly convincing anti-war film, evil is among all of us, even the fallen, even the victimized, and things can change on a whim. Nothing new for the war film of course, but Verhoeven handles the theme gently and with ease. No self-congratulatory story killing pontificating here, a major character’s death is handled briskly, matter of factly, and that haunted me more than anything to appear in the many Iraq movies that I largely didn’t see. Verhoeven has refound himself, he’s ALIVE again. The women make him hard again, the violence revs him up again, but, for once, and this is promising, he’s scared of the horrors he unleashes.

★★★½

Posted on January 3rd, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Action, Drama |

© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress.