Schlockmeister goes home and redoes WWII

Rating: 7/10 (15 April 2007)

Verhoeven apparently means The Black Book/Zwartboek as a reply to his 1977 film about the Dutch resistance, Soldier of Orange, which he now considers too heroic and unironic. He says this time he was trying to show "Your enemy can be better than you think and your friends can be much worse than you think;" but this generalization shows the level of subtlety he achieves in this movie isn't very high. A real black book is supposed to have existed but not been found. It was a record of collaboration with the Germans by some elements of the Dutch resistance. The title also apparently refers to the dark side of the resistance that Verhoeven thinks he's conveyed; but pretty early on his film turns into a glitzy, episodic adventure movie that seems like a pastiche of many other war movies we've seen before but with a perky, sexy young Jewish woman playing Mata Hari added in.
The Black Book doesn't reduce the Holocaust to lightweight comedy the way the blithe and clueless Roberto Benigni did in his Life Is Beautiful. But it does something just as bad: it makes Nazi persecution of the Jews and European resistance into a carnival of sex, explosions and betrayals. That this is an elaborate and expensive production doesn't keep it from being carelessly conceived and ultimately uninvolving. Verhoeven's heroine, Rachel Stein/Ellis de Vries (Carice van Houten), isn't someone who grimly survives as a wraithlike shadow living in a dark, war-torn world, like Wladyslaw Szpilman, the real-life character Adrien Brody plays in Polanski's moody, harrowing The Pianist. Rachel's more like Solomon Perel, the youth (also a real person) played by Marco Hofschneider in Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa. Solomon was a Polish Jew in Germany whom we see escape a Nazi pogrom and stay alive through a series of deceptions that include joining the Komosol in Russia and later becoming a member of the Hitler Youth. Europa Europa is a breathless adventure that thrills with the way its hero barely escapes danger. It makes sense as a movie because it's the story of a boy young enough to seem free of responsibility. He's an appealing picaresque Jewish hero (cp. Jerszy Kosinski's faked autobiography, The Painted Bird).
But Rachel is grown up, and it's surprising how blank she is as a character. Rachel is even bolder than Solomon, but as an adult, she never stops to question what she's doing, though at some point she must seem as confused and mistaken as the boy collaborator in Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien. Verhoeven, who became an expatriate schlockmeister in Hollywood in the Eighties and Nineties, has made Rachel's story not so much a personal odyssey as the basis for a veritable carnival of surprises and double-crosses involving German officers and Dutch resistance fighters, the two major ones all-too-similarly resulting in the mowing down of a little mob of ostensible good guys -- first a boatload of Jews escaping the country, then a group of resistance fighters who break into a Gestapo prison to free their brothers and find out they were expected . Escaping past German soldiers early on in an emblematic shot, Rachel bares her legs to them; to escape detection a little later, she enters the train compartment of a high-ranking Gestapo officer and charms him by admiring his stamp collection. A singer before the war, she is all show business and sexual favors. Her Gestapo boyfriend realizes she's Jewish the first time they have sex even though as we're ostentatiously shown, she's bleached her pubic hair to fake blondeness. Somehow she manages to stay at headquarters and sing at a party for Hitler's birthday. This boyfriend, SD officer Ludwig Müntze, is played by the charismatic German actor Sebastian Koch, who was the admirable, but politically conformist, playwright in the East German spy story The Lives of Others. Koch has some of the looks and easy machismo of a Gregory Peck, and his Gestapo man is never seen doing anything but make love to Ellis and try to prevent the execution of captured resistance fighters. Müntze is certainly a new revisionist conception: Nazi officer as adorable hunk. The Gestapo bad boy duties are entirely taken over by two other officers, the shaven-headed opportunist General Kaütner (Christian Berkel) and Günther Franken (Waldemar Kobus, my favorite actor in the movie), who is in charge when the boatload of Jews get mowed down and is a delightfully confident villain who's also a good whistler. Later the members of the resistance who are evil are duly (and dully) revealed; the main one was quite obvious all along because he had such a nice face and such a key position.
As Nathan Thrall wrote in The Jerusalem Post, The Black Book "manages to be simultaneously cloying and relentlessly sadistic. Its bombastic, brass-heavy score and glossy production clash with the somber message Verhoeven aims to convey. But above all, it is the film's tireless Hollywood pacing that makes it feel less like a suspenseful World War II film than a World War II thriller." Verhoeven claims that his Hollywood years gave him a stronger narrative sense that informed this new European-made movie, but the shadow of Robocop, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls hovers; and "narrative sense" means shallow characters and fake atmosphere backed up by corny movie music. Black Book has this much in its favor that's non-Hollywood: it features a host of competent European actors speaking the appropriate languages (mainly Flemish and German). The movie is conventional and shallow even in the poor execution of its hasty bookending that depicts Rachel teaching in a kibbutz and visited by one of her collaborator girlfriends in 1956 at two moments that hover ambiguously between a romanticized image of idyllic settlers and a final shot, evidently signaling the Suez crisis, when the kibbutz is seen surrounded by guard towers like a prison yard. Yes, as one viewer said, "the story never sags." But the thinking never rises to an adult level.