Black Magic

Paul Verhoeven's Black Book is more entertaining than any movie about Nazis has a right to be.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

Read Sam Adams' interview with Paul Verhoeven.

More entertaining than any movie about Nazis has a right to be, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book is a rip-snorting yarn that returns the director to his native Holland for the first time in 20 years. He has made no secret of his (entirely appropriate) disappointment with 2000's Hollow Man, the last in a string of critical punching bags that included Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Starship Troopers. But Verhoeven, who said that the last film he made before leaving Holland, 1984's The Fourth Man, was designed "to fuck the Dutch critics," has hardly come home with his tail between his legs. The movie is suffused with an invigorating enthusiasm that makes it, plain and simple, a treat.

It's also a movie about murder, betrayal and genocide, as well as deep historical shame. The movie's central character is Rachel (Carice van Houten) a Dutch Jew who is repeatedly betrayed by countrymen whom Verhoven and co-screenwriter Gerard Soeteman depict as only too willing to go along with the Nazi occupation. After she and her family narrowly escape being gunned down during an attempt to flee the country, Rachel takes refuge in a nearby farmhouse, where the farmer's wife loudly discourses on the extent to which the Jews are purportedly responsible for their own fate. Rachel's response is telling: Rather than fight back openly or suffer in silence, she resists covertly, drawing a sardonic cross in her oatmeal with molasses.

At once brazen and under the radar, Rachel's counter-aggression sets the stage for her reinvention as Ellis de Vries, a compliant Dutch Christian working in the offices of a Nazi officer named Ludwig Müntze (The Lives of Others' Sebastian Koch). As in Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Darkness, filmed in 1969 but not released in this country until last year, the anti-Nazi resistance is depicted as a small and contentious group, a minimal faction in a populace largely unsure whose side they want to be on. But where Melville's unfailing somber movie was cast in dark and restrictive tones, Verhoeven's is full of life in a way that is bound to strike some viewers as inappropriate. Rachel is constantly in danger, but she's also thrilled by the power her deception, not to mention her youth and attractiveness, allows her to exercise. Part of what drives her, of course, is a thirst for revenge, but as she worms her way into Müntze's good graces and eventually his bed, her allegiances begin to soften, even shift. Müntze is revealed to have redeeming, if not redemptive, qualities, and some of her resistance comrades reveal themselves to be snakes in saviors' clothing, more than willing to betray the Jews in order to safeguard Holland's future.

These are dark charges to bring against one's former homeland, but Verhoeven stages his story with the panache of a Hollywood spectacle; it's more Casablanca than Schindler's List — at least if Casablanca had softcore sex and a scene in which a character is doused by a bucket of human waste. A lubricious femme fatale in the time-honored Verhoeven tradition, Rachel is the resistance fighter as movie star, earning textual comparisons to Dietrich and Garbo (not for nothing does the movie make clear that before seducing Müntze she must dye her dark hair — all of it — blond). But as with Starship Troopers, the movie's alluring surfaces are there to illustrate the appeal of fascism, not endorse it. Black Book is flawless entertainment in which the good guys, at least some of them, win, but it's also capped with a shocking final reversal suggesting that no victory is ever permanent.

Verhoeven has often chalked up the violence in his movies to living through the German attacks on Holland as a young child, and while Black Book isn't remotely autobiographical, he approaches the period as an open book, rather than a chapter of history already lacquered shut. Clearly more attracted to sacrilege than sanctimony, Verhoeven risks undermining the tidy moral certainties of the "last good war." But in so doing he reminds us that being on the right side of history isn't the same as moral rectitude, and that victory can contain as much cruelty as open conflict does. In some ways, Black Book is a dangerous movie, but it's the right kind of dangerous.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Black Book

Directed by Paul VerhoevenA Sony Classics release