John Ford is reputed to have announced himself at a 1950 Directors Guild meeting as “a director of westerns.” This even though he worked in multiple genres his entire career. Similarly, Paul Verhoeven could announce himself as a director of war movies without much fear of contradiction, even though only four of his fourteen theatrical pictures depict militaries in action. But whether they're sublime (The Fourth Man, RoboCop) or ridiculous (Basic Instinct, Showgirls) or both (Flesh+Blood, Starship Troopers), Verhoeven's movies are always about conflict in the most extreme form that the individual film's milieu will allow. He's not one for the pastoral.
Verhoeven was born in 1938 in Amsterdam; in interviews, he talks about how seeing and hearing war around him as a child shaped both his worldview and his sensibility. He's made two films about World War II up until now; the sprawling, multiperspective Soldier of Orange (1977) and the made-for-television postwar revenge tale All Things Pass (1979). After the box office strikeout of the 2000 sci-fi picture Hollow Man (which didn't quite deliver everything one might have expected from a Verhoeven invisible-man movie), the director returned to Holland (and reteamed with Gerard Soeteman, his longtime screenwriting collaborator there) to make this, his first Dutch-language film in 20 years, about the anti-German resistance in the final days of the war.
Black Book is Verhoeven's best film since RoboCop: audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining. It is completely apt, given Verhoeven's love of excess (which, at his best, he deploys more cannily than most mavens of over-the-top), that given another chance to make a World War II movie, he would make about five of them in one. Really, this has just about everything: air attacks, narrow escapes, explosions, amorous entanglements, betrayals, murders, espionage, poisoning, prison humiliations. The only thing not explicitly dealt with in Black Book is the Holocaust. But that event looms large as an offstage presence: The movie's heroine is a Jew trying to elude the Nazis.
Maybe “elude” is the wrong word, given that less than halfway through the movie, Rachel Stein (the luminous Carice van Houten)—after a disastrous attempt to escape Holland—changes her name, joins up with a group of resistance fighters, dyes her hair (all of her hair—there's a scene detailing the process that's vintage Verhoeven), and pretty much falls into bed with a top Gestapo officer (Sebastian Koch, the superb German actor who also shines in the recent The Lives of Others) in the Nazi occupation of her country. This is all for a very good cause, as anyone who's seen Hitchcock's Notorious already knows. And there are more than a few moments when Black Book comes across like Notorious on steroids. One of the things that gives Black Book its rush is its heroine's unstinting but hardly Pollyanna-ish goodness, which shines through regardless of the squalor she's subjected to—and nobody can dole out squalor like Verhoeven.
The picture actually opens in Israel in the late '50s, where Rachel now teaches in what looks like a pretty idyllic kibbutz. An old acquaintance, Ronnie (Halina Reijn), turns up as part of a tourist group; this sparks old memories for Rachel. The rest of the film, save its resignation-filled coda, is told in flashback. Once in the past, we're brought to another idyll; Rachel on a dock on a lake, listening to a record, then impetuously going for a sail with a young man. From the water she gets a perfect view of German planes bombing the house she's been hiding out in. And so the chain of disasters begins. There are so many of them that some audience members might be a little jarred when the black book of the movie's title—first shown in the early part of the film, when Rachel enlists a sympathetic family physician to help her get out of the country—takes on its prominent significance in the film's final quarter. Besides everything else, Black Book turns out to be a whodunit as well. Whatever it is at any given time, Black Book is a constant supplier of top-flight movie-movie thrills.
—Glenn Kenny
READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007
