Verhoeven's masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (21 September 2009)

Director Paul Verhoeven, infamous in America for his ultra-violent satires like "Total Recall" and "Robocop" and his paranoid thrillers like "Basic Instinct", returned to his native Holland to make this complex and beautiful film about hypocrisy and human character in the context of a story about the Dutch resistance in the last days of WWII. He found an incredible leading lady in Carice van Houten, and matched her up with the dynamic Thom Hoffman and the stolid and emotive Sebastian Koch to come up with a dizzying mixture of romance, terror and paranoia.
Rachel Stein (van Houten) is a young Jewish woman forced to give up her livelihood as a singer in Germany and go into hiding. When she witnesses the brutal death of her entire family at an SS death squad's hands, she goes undercover as the lover of the SS commander Muntze (Koch) to get her own revenge. But she finds that it's not easy to know between good and evil, friend and foe, when money and power are involved.
There's something of a mystery element to the plot, which keeps us guessing at all times regarding different characters' motives and actions. Towards the end of the film this produces an astonishing moral disorientation, as we're pulled inescapably into sympathizing with several Nazi characters and into recognizing the really horrible actions that victims can perpetrate on their one-time persecutors. There's a place where the film takes us where one would want to simply throw down one's hands and give up on the species -- but just as soon as he's let that sink in, Verhoeven reveals the film's true heroes to us and allows for the possibility of morally repugnant but emotionally satisfying revenge to come to fruition.
I just cannot say enough about how excellent von Houten and Koch are in this film -- their natural chemistry, the zesty way they play their love scenes, the furtive glances and the emotional revelations. Of course their romance is deeply controversial and dangerous, but we do really feel like they made a real human connection. The point of the movie isn't to say "well, there were some Nazis who were good." It's to say that good and evil themselves mean nothing to people going through such situations and circumstances, so far beyond what human beings in a civilization should have to go through. At a certain point, the real human connection is all that we have.
This is the best film I've seen by Verhoeven. His bold use of grotesque violence in this film is among its more daring artistic leaps. It's the same kind of violence that he used in his ridiculous action movies, and while we're used to more taste and sentimentality being put into death in a historical film, it accurately and directly conveys the naked reality of the situation, at a time when even the ostensible "good guys" couldn't really afford to be noble about anything. Although the film is full of graphic sex and violence, I would argue that it is less an "exploitation" film than most of the more "tasteful" epics we've seen from Hollywood on the subject of the holocaust and the war. There is no false or unearned sentiment in this movie; the movie and the characters don't have time for it.
It's a gorgeous, profound, provocative film that takes the dialog about the holocaust and WWII to another level in terms of screen stories.