A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Black Book (Zwartboek)

Date Viewed: 5/13/07

Details:

Carice van Houten (Rachel/Ellis)

Sebastian Koch (Müntze)

Thom Hoffman (Akkermans)

Halina Reijn (Ronnie)

Waldemar Kobus (Franken)

Dolf de Vries (Smaal)

Co-written & directed by: Paul Verhoeven

Score: +

The Review: A WW-II resistance movie with a perspective you've likely never taken before, coupled with the typical twists and turns appropriate to collaborators, conspirators and evil incarnate.

Black Book starts in 1956 in an Israeli kibbutz, so you know up-front that the two main female characters (van Houten as Rachel, and Reijn as Ronnie) have survived the experience -- but you have no clue what the experience was, or how scarred they really are. The rest of the film is told, almost (but not quite) monochromatically, as flashback and reminiscence. That thread wanders the small towns and water-filled countryside of Holland under German occupation (and from the date, we the audience know it's near the end of the war), where several Jewish families are still in hiding, waiting for the opportunity to escape across the border. Critical to the film, is that this escape is seldom successful -- there are intimations of betrayal, and Rachel happens to be the sole survivor of one such incident. She chooses to fight back, but she does the opposite of going underground.

The camera keeps rolling after the truce, allowing Verhoeven to capture, if not the horror (a term justly reserved for other events), then at least the indignity and injustice of post-war retribution and revenge by "common" citizens. There are some strong echoes of similar treatments by Eastwood in his Letters from Iwo Jima.

Besides the expected twists and turns of a puzzle film -- and there are puzzles enough -- there are some shocks. The way that Rachel fights back will not be to many people's taste, and the R-rating is perhaps deserved for several scenes, some more watchable than others.

Two canonical aspects of a Verhoeven film come through clearly. First, there is a lot of violence -- even if not a lot of blood, guts and gore in scarlet plumes; the vision is not of a gentle world. And second, ambiguity abounds -- Germans who are not evil, Dutch who are clearly collaborators and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocents, black and white that is more often portrayed in tones of grey. Another curious point of ambiguity is the movie's title -- which of course is resolved in good time, but you are so caught up in the film and its characters, that you will probably not tumble to its meaning until near the end.

In Dutch, German and English with subtitles.

(22-May-07)

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