Exploitative, but never boring

Rating: 6/10 (5 November 2016)

Before he dazzled Hollywood with his blood-soaked satires Robocop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997) - and made us cringe with Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995) - director Paul Verhoeven made Soldier of Orange (1977) in his native Netherlands, a film about the Dutch resistance movement during World War II which starred Rutgher Hauer. Almost thirty years later, and only six years since Hollow Man (2000) seemed to drain him of his creativity, Verhoeven returned to his homeland to make Zwartboek (Black Book), and to again highlight his country's heroic struggle during the Nazi occupation.
In 1944, Dutch Jew Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a singer living in Berlin before the war, hides from the Nazi regime in the war-torn Netherlands. When the farmhouse she was hiding in is destroyed by the Americans, she is forced to flee, reuniting with her family before setting off by boat to the safer south. However, the boat is ambushed by the Nazis and Rachel narrowly escapes with her life, watching her entire family murdered in the process. Lost and alone, she decides to join the resistance in The Hague, where her many talents are put to good use. A chance meeting on a train leads her to charming the socks off high-ranking Nazi officer Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), so Rachel, under the guise of Ellis de Vries, is given the task of seducing him.
World War II movies seem to be made with one of two intentions. One is to delve into the human soul and explore the horrors of battle, and the other is to simply entertain. Verhoeven's movie seems to lie somewhere in between, and the results are intriguing to say the least. Too often does the drama get interrupted by an unnecessary gun battle or explosion for the film to be taken too seriously, but, even at 145 minutes, Black Book is never in danger of dragging. It also never misses an opportunity to get van Houten in the nude, but to anyone familiar with the work of Paul Verhoeven, this will come as no surprise. While the actress now most famous as Melisandre the Red Priestess in Game of Thrones is staggeringly beautiful, her constant clothes-shedding hardly serves the plot or her character.
In fact, Black Book asks a hell of a lot of van Houten, who is forced to don a number of faces and personalities as her character digs herself deeper into the role of secret agent and uncovers betrayals and secret plots at every turn. She handles it exceptionally well, and van Houten really should have gone on to be a A-lister after this. She has a sparkling chemistry with Koch, who is also very good as the man on the side facing defeat, hoping to agree a truce with the resistance to avoid more bloodshed. It's a handsomely shot film all round, made all the more staggering that this was conceived on such a modest budget, and it's clear that Verhoeven was out to make a movie he could be proud of. While his familiar exploitative approach prevents it from being great, Black Book is never boring and is peppered with enough grey characters (Verhoeven certainly doesn't white-wash the portrayal of his fellow Dutch) to keep the twists and turns coming until the very end.