Excellent film about Dutch resistance.

Rating: 8/10 (30 May 2008)

Says my TV guide, "In World War II Holland, a woman of the Jewish resistance falls in love with the German officer she was sent to seduce." That makes it sound like another sappy love story. We visualize the scene in which the luscious babe holds a trembling pistol against the head of her sleeping Nazi lover, her face a mask of anguish. "Do I love him too much to kill him"? Actually, it's much more than that, a bitter and adult story of intrigue and betrayal among the Dutch resistance during the German occupation.
Paul Verhoeven directed not only this highly European film but a number of American action movies as well, and he learned his commercial lessons in Hollywood, but he hasn't imported them to his native Holland. This isn't "Robocop" or a Schwarzenegger Schlagfest by any means. Lots of nudity, yes, but mostly non-erotic -- and male as well as female. Sharon Stone may open her knees and cross her legs while half a dozen men goggle and lick their lips. Here, Clarice Van Houten bleaches her pubic hair on screen and nothing is made of it except that she is Jewish, has black hair, and is trying to make herself blond all over so as not to be found out.
What horror. And it doesn't follow the usual trajectory, with a climactic shoot out at the end. Most of the good guys die before the end, except the ones who most deserve it. The German officer with whom Clarice falls in love (Jobst Schnibbe) is a fundamentally decent guy who, seeing the war's end, tries to prevent more bloodshed by arranging a truce with the Resistance. These kinds of stories generally call for him to die a heroic, self-sacrificing death, maybe in order to save the girl's life. But it doesn't happen. He dies alright, but only because he's caught, mistaken for a Nazi, and the Canadians who liberate the city permit a cooperative but still fascistic German to carry out the death sentence that has been imposed on Schnibbe. It's not a heroic death. Schnibbe is simply stood up against a stone wall and shot.
If there's a problem with the film, it may be that Verhoeven has learned a little too much from Hollywood. The end of the war, and the liberation of Amsterdam by the British and Canadians, is followed by a lengthy story of mistaken intentions and Allied gloating that lead not just to Schnibbe's death but to the incarceration and humiliation of Clarice by a drunken Dutch rabble. I mean -- they dump a cauldron of human excrement on her, and the scene is drawn out until long after we've grasped the point. And there's a great deal of gun play. It seems to go on and on, while automatic weapons tear bodies apart.
But this is no more a dumb action movie than it is a simple-minded love story. If it has its commercial elements, it at least is ambitious enough to reach for an audience of grown-ups who can understand the complexity of motives and of human nature.
Every once in a while, during a pause in the narrative, I thought of Anne Frank and her family and friends, most of whom lived in Holland and died before the end of the war -- and of Audrey Hepburn too, who managed to live through it.