WhatzUp - Leisure Time Weekly for Northeast Indiana

Black Book
by Catherine Lee

Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, Showgirls. These are not movies made for the art house. They are some of the studio pictures directed by Paul Verhoeven who, before coming to Hollywood, made movies in his home country, the Netherlands. But Verhoeven’s exciting new movie, Black Book, brings him much closer to his earlier films, especially Soldier of Orange. Black Book was nominated this year for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language movie, an honor the film deserves. It is a breathtaking experience mixing all the rockin’ sockin’ visual style of Robocop, another Verhoeven film, with story and characters that are more complex than those found in a typical Hollywood action movie.

“Inspired by true events,” Black Book tells the story of a young Jewish woman, Rachel Stein, hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands, and her work with the Dutch resistance. Black Book begins with a brief scene in Israel in 1956, so we know she survives the war, but as the story continues you feel the jeopardy she faces daily and wonder how she will wiggle out of each disaster. Though the horrors she faces are very different than Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist, her ability to continue in the face of tragedy after tragedy, always facing the threat of death if she is found out, keeps us at the edge of our seats.

Black Book is two and a half hours long and mostly subtitled; either of these facts might keep you out of the theater, but Black Book is so fast-paced and full of plot twists you don’t look at your watch. The latest installment of Pirates of the Caribbean is two hours and 47 minutes long. Black Book isn’t a silly film, but on the big screen it is just as much of an adventure.

Filling up that big Cinemascope screen in every scene is Carice van Houten. She is a sensation in Black Book, combining a very good performance with abundant movie star charisma. Van Houten looks a little like Kirsten Dunst. I enjoy Dunst, but seeing van Houton I kept thinking, “Wow, she’s really beautiful and she’s giving a performance I don’t think Dunst could muster.”

Rachel is the kind of character few young actresses get the opportunity to play. When we first see her in Israel in 1956, she is lovely but modest and subdued, a school teacher, singing with her students, protecting them from the nosy attention of tourists who have come to visit the kibbutz where she lives. One of those tourists is an old friend of Rachel’s, and it triggers memories of surviving the war. Black Book goes back to 1944, and Rachel is in hiding with a big, somber farm family. But even though she’s in hiding, she has the invincibility of the young. She listens to records of herself singing before the war. She sunbathes. She flirts. She learns Bible verses to satisfy her host family.

In quick succession, her host family is bombed. When she makes plans to escape with the boy who is helping her, she witnesses the murder of her family and the boy. This scene is particularly good. She is hiding in the river, in water up to her neck. The camera focuses on her face as her family and friend are shot and robbed. You see her pain and also her determination to survive and avenge them.

As she continues to run and hide, she is enlisted to help the resistance fighters who are hiding her and others. When she catches the eye and attention of the Gestapo commander, she is willing – without even blinking – to become his girlfriend to help the cause. By now, Rachel has become Ellis de Vries. To fool the Germans, she has dyed her hair blonde – all of it. She has courage and is very comfortable using her loveliness to get what she needs and do what needs to be done. That doesn’t mean she isn’t vulnerable or almost gullible. As Black Book gets more involved and complicated, you do want to scream at her sometimes. Black Book doesn’t trade in the simplistic labels of many World War II-era films. It begins in a very straightforward way, with good guys and bad guys, but as the war is drawing to a close everyone understands that chaos is coming before any real peace. Everyone is out for themselves. Ellis falls for the Nazi officer she has been using. He has known since almost the beginning that she is Jewish, but his family was killed by British bombs, and he wants the killing to stop. This “good” Nazi is played by Sebastian Koch, who has a very handsome, sympathetic face. He played the artist under observation in the film that did win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year, The Lives of Others, and he is wonderful here.

All the supporting players are wonderful. They are mostly the men of the resistance, but they are not all good guys. Black Book revels in the ambiguity of actions and alliances of the last days of the war. There are heroic and villainous acts committed on all sides. Who is a good guy and who is a bad guy isn’t as simple as old-fashioned war movies would have us believe. Black Book is written by Verhoeven and his long-time collaborator Gerard Soeteman. They use this film to make a strong case for the powerfully corrupting influence of war, even on basically good people. You cannot miss the very direct references towards today when the Nazis claim to be "fighting against terrorism for a free Europe." And there is a fairly mild, yet still horrible example of water-boarding in Black Book. I defy those who claim water-boarding isn’t torture to watch even this quick, mild example of the tactic and still make that claim. The Nazis didn’t invent this technique, but they did practice it.

Black Book doesn’t stint on violence or sexuality. Ms. van Houten takes off her clothes quite often in Black Book (so does a Nazi officer which isn’t very pretty, but is kind of funny). Readers know I’m a wimp, but the violence is manageable and absolutely essential to the story. Whether he stays in his homeland or comes back to Hollywood, I hope Black Book means we can look for another wonderful film from Paul Verhoeven. It is a pleasure to see what he can do when he’s passionate about a project. .

Catherine Lee is the executive director of Fort Wayne Cinema Center, the only independently operated movie theater in Fort Wayne, specializing in independent, foreign, documentary, specialty and classic films.