Sensational Sex and Violence, But Left Me Emotionally and Intellectually Unmoved

Rating: 6/10 (27 April 2008)

If you like seeing beautiful young women completely naked, and posed in compromising and perverse scenarios, then "Black Book" is for you.
Carice van Houten as Rachel / Ellis, a Jew who falls in love with a Gestapo chief, is fully exposed on screen, and things are done to her body that I've not only not seen in movies before, I didn't think I'd ever see.
The sex only lets up in order to make way for graphic violence: a graphic scene of torture by water boarding, death by firing squad, and suffocation in a coffin whose lid is slowly screwed shut.
Director Paul Verhoeven was criticized for depicting a Jewish woman as the lover of a Gestapo chief, and for depicting the Dutch Resistance as less than uniformly heroic in its resistance. I expected to be shocked by these features, but I was not. I just felt bludgeoned into numbness by all the nudity and bloodletting.
I watched this movie on DVD, and after a while I just fast forwarded or closed my eyes through scenes I simply didn't want to watch: a woman exposing Ellis' body to the very Nazi who had murdered her parents, Ellis being drenched in bodily waste, yet another pile of corpses.
The production values are very high. The movie looks fantastic. If you are into sex, violence, and sensation, this is the movie for you.
I've read a lot of memoirs of the Nazi era, and met survivors. The Nazi era was not fun and games. I find watching movies about those days to be hard. When I do watch them, I want to feel that I've learned something, or felt something, that made watching the movie worthwhile.
I didn't learn anything about the WW II era while watching this movie, although I did learn something about exploitation. I was unmoved. Carice van Houten is lovely, but she plays her role as a tough cookie. Given that she is a sex toy in the film, I found it hard to relate to her humanity.
In the end, when Ellis / Rachel finally breaks down and begins to cry, one of her co-stars morphs into an eyebrow arching, mustache twirling parody of a Hitchcock villain, and tries to murder her by injection. That scene was so desperate for shock value I lost all faith in the film at that point.
Sebastian Koch, who played Ludwig Muntze, the kind and sensitive Gestapo chief with whom Rachel falls in love, left me completely unmoved. This is especially remarkable given how terrific Koch was in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film "The Lives of Others."