Very Good but Two Twists Too Many

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2009)

Except for a couple of outlandish twists at the very end of the movie, Zwartboek (Black Book)might be a candidate for best World War II movie. As it is, Carice van Houten as Rachel Stein, a young Jewish woman who joins the Dutch resistance when she narrowly escapes an ambush in which the rest of her family is killed, performs brilliantly, and she is well matched by Sebastian Koch as Ludwig Muntze, the high-ranking Gestapo official whom Rachel agrees to seduce on behalf of the Resistance group she joins. Supposedly, the film is "based on" a true story, and that may be so. It is possible to believe that the Nazis discover she is a spy and trick the Resistance into believing she has betrayed them, putting her in life-threatening danger from both sides. That she might actually have fallen in love with Muntze, the "good Nazi," is plausible. That Muntze may have risked his own life to preserve hers is also plausible. The tension and the danger faced by both characters is brilliantly sustained by director Paul Verhoeven, who is also credited as co-author of the script. This viewer was prepared for certain of the betrayals that emerge toward the film's end; they made perfectly good sense. I won't describe the two other events that made no sense whatever, but they went a long way toward undermining the credibility of what was otherwise a totally convincing story. I'd certainly award a 10 to the first 95 percent of the movie and a 1 to the final 5 percent. Both Ms. van Houten and Koch hold up their ends extremely well. On the strength of the first 95 percent, I awarded Zwartboek an 8.