Less breasts, more coherence

Rating: 4/10 (22 August 2008)

Let's play a game: you're a well-known Nazi commander hiding out in the Netherlands, 1945. The country is free and the other Nazis are fleeing the ship like a pack of hydrophobic rats. You're in uniform, and you're carrying a gun, and I guess we accept the fact that you're stupid enough to walk into the middle of a parade of Dutch nationals championing the overthrow of everything you stood for, because you've renounced Nazism and you're trying to save a Jewish woman from harm, and maybe you're naïve enough to think that everyone in the street is magically aware of this. Suddenly, a faceless someone tries to assassinate you and escapes into the throng. What do you do? A. let the guy escape, on the grounds that any attempt to pursue him will invite the attention of thousands of people who want you dead, or B., decide it's a good idea to fire your gun in the air, hoping to clear a path through the crowd, and apparently forgetting that doing so will make you the center of attention of every single person in the square.
Those who picked A are part of that sad minority of moviegoers that expects this film to make a modicum of sense. Sorry to say, you'll be a trifle disappointed.
Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) is a young Jewish darling living in the Netherlands during the Second World War. After falling in with a wing of the Dutch Resistance, she uses her fair skin and blonde hair to pass herself off as a gentile. Under the direction of Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman), a charismatic resistance leader with secrets of his own, she sleeps her way into the favor of Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch), an oxymoronic Nazi-with-a-heart, whom she intends to assassinate, but eventually adores.
When the movie isn't hitting you overhead with a plot that's shoddy enough for a baby to attack, it's bombarding you with nudity and stylized violence at a level that redefines gratuitous, and if my opening citation is the most offensive example of the story's stupidity, there are plenty of others to go with it.
Take the ill-fated escape of Akkermans, the not-so-surprising villain. The whole plan rests on his ability to successfully play dead in a closed coffin, which strikes me as something of a no-brainer, but is apparently too tricky for the party in question. Akkermans panics at the first sign of trouble, bangs on the roof of the coffin, and shouts, "what's going on up there?" loud enough for the whole vengeful world to hear. And we're supposed to believe this guy? Give me a freaking break.
Speaking more generally, I'm sick and tired of how rarely we encounter movies where the female spy-character relies on some other method beyond sexual seduction. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution was a much better film, but did nothing to break the pattern. Again and again, in spy movies, detective movies, and stories of espionage, male characters rely on their wits and fortitude while the women whore themselves off to gullible sex fiends who frequently steal their hearts. Are we really so backward that even our most respected directors must continually commodify the woman as we know her? And is our situation really so entrenched that I can't even raise these kinds of question without feeling like I'm mowing over finely cut grass? "Yes" to both 1 and 2, and a resounding thumbs down to the movie in question.
Or maybe not quite.
In the last four or five minutes, the film gets unexpectedly mature, perhaps the only reason why I rated it as highly as I did. Had Verhoeven handled the ending the way he'd handled the rest of the movie, Rachel would have shot all her enemies to pieces and walked naked into the sunset, but somehow or other, the filmmakers came to their senses and took the realistic outing. The heroes get their revenge . . . and they're left with nothing but bitterness. There's no sense of redemption, no closure of any kind. This is precisely the kind of ending a war movie needs.
On an added note, The Black Book wisely avoids a tenet all too common in Holocaust films: the assumption that anti-Semitism magically disappeared with the fall of the Third Reich. In Verhoeven's film, the war ends and the hatred keeps thriving. Rachel trades in Nazi persecution for persecution by the gentile Dutch. Like any victim of war, her suffering is timeless, universal. Much like this movie might have been if Verhoeven directed from somewhere above the waist.