A women's film devoid of emotional impact

Rating: 3/10 (12 September 2009)

Black Book is a women's film, about a rich young Jewess, formerly a pop singer, trying to survive in Nazi-occupied Holland. Sadly, director Paul Verhoeven does not understand women and nor does he know how to convey emotion. A glance at his Hollywood CV would have warned the producers. The result is an empty depiction of events, in which the heroine Rachel (Carice Van Houten) acts like Robocop (an earlier Verhoeven effort). Along the way, we get some lingering shots of her tits and a few seconds of her bare bottom. Neither views suit a women's film, a signal that something is very wrong. The motivation of Verhoeven's heroine is contorted, as her family and lover are wiped out before her eyes and she makes a narrow blood-spattered escape, yet does not for a moment shed a tear for them, nor suspect the people who sent them to their fate. Instead, she has unmotivated sex with a resistance member before going into the Nazi headquarters and seducing the Gestapo chief, whom she treats with bizarrely sudden love and affection. Her ostensible purpose is to save three resistance men from torture. Instead, she places a microphone in the torturer's office, and she and her colleagues listen to him having noisy sex. Her motive fades even further into the background as Verhoeven makes a meal of the Nazi setting, presumably to appeal to his German market. This is a thoroughly unpleasant film made by a very cynical and sociopathic film-maker, and it deserves to be blasted into oblivion by the idiotic "Inglourious Basterds", which has the merit of being sheer fantasy and frank wish-fulfilment.