Verhoeven-ian ethics: ride the tiger's back

Rating: 8/10 (9 November 2007)

It seems clear to me that this is another Verhoeven film where people have totally missed the point. They have taken it as a simple WWII romance thriller.
On this level there were significant problems with Black Book, the cliché that the war is over but the atrocities aren't, with the head shaving of women who slept with Nazis, kangaroo courts etc. The plot-line gets silly, I mean I couldn't really have cared less who the traitor was by the end of the movie. It was also far too glossy, much better say Melville's Army of Shadows.
However I suspect there is entirely another level of commentary. I was reminded in particular of Verhoeven's movie Flesh + Blood, a gleeful study of amorality and the survival of the fittest. So the only character that interested me in this film was Ronnie (Franken's secretary). She was incredibly apolitical, a good-time-girl out for herself. As soon as the war is over she goes from being the squeeze of an SD capo to being the squeeze of a Canadian officer, as if there were nothing to distinguish them (and crucially she is not judged in this movie). That I felt, was the only part of the film which was Verhoeven to the core. It is no accident that the film really begins and ends with Ronnie, she is like a Red Queen prancing in between the carnage.
She is the only character in the movie who comes out unscathed, she just gets on with life. I think one of the points that the movie might have been trying to make is that the world is a lunatic asylum and trying to do what is right goes almost against the grain of existence and is so futile, that it is almost ruinous, far better to ride the back of the tiger (see how Ronnie cavorts with the soldiers who are pouring champagne all over her, immediately after her friend's arrest).
There is also Verhoeven's like of showing what powerful men are like in public compared to behind the scenes. In Zwartboek we are shown the butcher who is in fact a humanist, and the resistance hero who is in fact the darkest of profiteers. The scene where Akkermans attempts murder and then goes to the window to accept the acclamation of the crowd, looks totally ridiculous as part of the film but is very Verhoevian.