welcome back, Paul!!!

Rating: 8/10 (25 June 2007)

I always admired Paul Verhoeven's movies. He has been one of the most prominent dutch directors; during the seventies and the eighties thanks to his films the Holland gained a lot of attention in the movie scene. In 1987 he directed ROBOCOP, his first movie produced by Hollywood studios. The success of the feature encouraged him to stay in USA. He spent almost 13 years in America, where he directed some very famous, controversial and successful movies, such as TOTAL RECALL, BASIC INSTINCT and STARSHIP TROOPERS. With his cleverness and boldness he showed us it was possible for a director to work in the Hollywood system without renouncing to his own visions and to his own favorite themes; his movies speak about the violence and the conflicts in modern society. After THE HOLLOW MAN (2000), a rather lucky and kinky updating of the classic THE INVISIBLE MAN, Verhoeven decided to stop with the Hollywood blockbusters. In fact the movie, despite great special effects and a riveting music score by Jerry Goldsmith, didn't satisfied his director. During the years he cherished a lot of project, but he also took the main decision to leave the United States and to come back working in Neatherland, resolute to accomplish movies that were nearer to his own poetics. The first result of the new period in his career is BLACK BOOK (ZWARTBOEK), a movie he wrote with his longtime collaborator Gerard Soeteman, in which he tackles a quite delicate matter: the Nazi occupation of Holland during the Second World War. The director said he thought about to make this film for many years, so it's definitely meaningful that in the end it became the movie of his return in the native country. A very successful return indeed, if we consider BLACK BOOK was in competition at the last Venice Film Festival, it received good reviews, it was almost nominated for the Oscar in the best foreign language film category and in Holland it attracted crowds of people in the cinemas. The story, like many times in Verhoeven's career, provides a female heroine, confirming the interest of the director in featuring strong women portraits (even if he quite often has been accused to be sexist and misogynous!) and it's about a Jewish girl, Ellies/Rachel (the sexy, pretty and talented Carice Van Houten, a dutch actress much appreciated in her country, who deservedly could have her international breakthrough thanks to this film), who lost her family while they were leaving Neatherlands to save their own life. After that tragedy Ellies decides to join the resistance fighters, the main mission that they entrust her is to become the lover of a German officer (Sebastian Koch that you can see also in the much awarded THE LIVES OF THE OTHERS), to extort as much informations as possible. But the girl falls in love with him, who is not a bad person at all, in spite of being a member of Nazi army. In the meantime she discovers that the truth concerning her family's tragic death is connected to the title black book, and she'll see it's not an easy task to understand to whom she can trust...even because in wartime people who wants to survive is disposed to do everything, even to change opinions (symbolic in this way the role of Rachel's friend, played by Halina Reijn) and to betray, no matter what... Choosing a Jewish person as leading character, Verhoeven reminds us the tragedies the Hebraic people lived during the first half of twentieth century (at the beginning of the film we see Ellies hiding herself in a garret, just like Anne Frank), but the director fairly isn't interested in easy dogmatism's: he doesn't want to distinguish between good and evil, or murderers and victims. That's because he thinks the matter is much more complex and you mustn't indulge in generalizations when you speak about the war. His detractors said he's a revisionist, but it will be more apt to recognize the sprightliness of a man, able to give us an ethical lesson about history and the way to deal with it. The fact he teaches us following the rules of the classic movie masters (the influences of Hitchcock and Aldrich are noteworthy) is a kinda value, and the spectator can't do without notice Verhoeven didn't lose the skills to use the suspense (let see the sequence in which the girl is trying to put a microphone in the enemy's office, wonderful display of space and rhythm by the director). And I'm quite happy to realize he didn't stop to be a scoundrel guy either (try to see the scene where the girl dyes her pubic hairs admonishing his friend, and the public with him, to not peer at her, not before to showing us the operation in full frontal). However it's not sufficient to say BLACK BOOK is a great film about history, because Verhoeven doesn't lose the occasion to speak also about the present: when Rachel is tortured you can think about Abu Grahib's prison and also riveting is the last sequence, set in an Israeli kibbutz, built with the money recovered from the Nazi. We see the protagonist, now married and with a child, we can think she's happy now, but the alarms show us a different reality that tears aside the image of apparent serenity. There's no peace yet for the Jewish people: another time, another place, but again the tragedy of war, and again Verhoeven doesn't want to say who is good or evil, who is guilty or innocence. For this and many other reasons: well come back, Paul!