Agent provocateur

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 2008)

"I don't believe that people should spend their time flying on dragons." – Paul Verhoeven (on Avatar)
Here's a bit of trivia. Whilst preparing "Eyes Wide Shut", Stanley Kubrick had several long telephone calls with Paul Verhoeven, asking for advice on how to shoot nudity. Kubrick considered Verhoeven to be one of the few directors who shot nudity well, and valued Verhoeven's advice.
On the flip side, Steven Spielberg convinced George Lucas to let Verhoeven shoot "Return of the Jedi" based on Verhoeven's film "Soldier of Orange". But Spielberg quickly backtracked his decision when he saw "Turks Fruit" and "Spleeters", saying that he found all the casual nudity repulsive. "They probably thought I'd have the Jedi fking!" Verhoeven laughed in an interview.
The point is, different people respond to Verhoeven's sensibilities in different ways. You're either in tune with what he does, or cringe at how trashy he can be.
In any case, whether you like it or not, three things leap out at you whilst watching "Black Book". The first is the acting by Carice van Houten. Capturing a weird mixture of fragility and assertiveness, she essentially plays a Jewish girl who must sleep with Nazis in order to save her countrymen.
The second notable thing is the sheer pace of Verhoeven's film. The film isn't taut, so much as it's blunt. Things happen at a feverish pace, as is common in commercial film-making, but they're garish and extreme things, pushed almost to the point of ridiculousness
The third interesting thing is director Paul Verhoeven himself. "Black Book" has a sexuality and frankness that Verhoeven seems to revel in. Close ups of genitals, abrupt violence, toilets, feces, nudity and dark humour...it's all very refreshing in todays PG-13 climate.
In lesser hands, this vulgarity might seem exploitative, but Verhoeven's "nastiness" for once feels entirely justified; his frequent outbursts of horror and filth seem to suit what is really a tale of deplorable and base human beings.
Like most Verhoeven films, "Black Book" is also unashamedly melodramatic. Yes, Verhoeven isn't one for subtlety, but here his characters are all morally complex. There's the Jew who falls in love with a Nazi, a Nazi who bargains with Dutch resistance fighters in order to lessen bloodshed, a fiendish plot to rob wealthy Jews, a resistance fighter who fights for himself and not his country, and an ironic twist in which the newly liberated Dutch resort to the kind of barbarism displayed by the very Nazis they despised.
8.5/10 - "Book" works as a romance, spy thriller, action movie, epic, character study and message movie. The film also ends with a brilliant shot which recalls the WTC shot at the end of Spielberg's "Munich". It's an elegant shot, filled with a genuine sense of darkness. While Spielberg simply says "an eye for an eye makes everyone blind", Verhoeven's coda is far more dour. Our hero's troubles aren't over and never will be. The sudden shift from World War 2 Europe to the deserts of the Middle East is also hugely poetic, raising all kinds of political overtones. One only wishes that Verhoeven held this shot a few seconds longer.
Worth two viewings.