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Black Book
t Glasby
There's something about the violent proclivities of Paul Verhoeven's best work that belongs forever to late twentieth century America. Robocop was a Republican's wet dream of corporate quagmires and zero-tolerance policing. Starship Troopers both aggrandised and attacked the excesses of American foreign policy. Showgirls and Hollow Man showed a man out of time and possibly out of his mind. Since then Verhoeven has stomped home to make "fruity films about suffering", to paraphrase Barton Fink, another outsider artiste adrift in LA.
Reassuringly, Black Book proves you can take the man out of Hollywood but you can't take Hollywood out of the man. Verhoeven may have been aspiring towards making a female-fronted Schindler's List, but the result is an audacious, expansive war romp focussing on an intriguing Indiana Jane rather than the usual GI Joes.
Convoluted rather than complex, the piecemeal plot concerns Rachel Rosenthal (Van Houten), a Dutch Jew hiding from the Nazis during the dark days of 1945. To cut an (over) long story short, Rachel loses her safehouse in a bombing raid, her family in a hail of SS bullets and her identity as she changes her name, dyes her hair (collar and cuffs) and joins the resistance. Her mission? To spend as much time as possible in the buff as the plaything of a stamp-collecting Nazi (Koch) while sabotaging the German war effort.
Black Book is extremely contrived. The many narrative about-turns are announced with Klaxons ("Trust no one!" warns a minor character before proving himself deeply untrustworthy) and Rachel has a preternatural knack for being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, like Forrest Gump by way of Anne Frank. On the plus side, this allows us access to the point-of-view of all parties - the Jews, the Nazis, the resistance, the Allies and their Dutch collaborators - something which is unprecedented outside of ''Allo 'Allo.'
As with all of Verhoeven's films, Black Book is as subtle as a Teutonic stand-up comic; particularly in terms of its sexual content and its ace 'A-Team'-style action sequences. Carrots and guns play a far too prominent part in the love scenes and the chief villain (Kobus) is a fat, organ-playing dilettante with a tiny penis. Then again, benchmark war films such as Saving Private Ryan are rarely without inauthentic 'movie' moments and if the two-tone psychosis of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List represents the most nuanced portrayal of a Nazi officer we're ever likely to see then all bets are off.
Verhoeven's a smart cookie. Just as Basic Instinct punctuated the porn with a few nods to female empowerment, Black Book's tendency towards leering at the female form is excused, in part, by Rachel's coolheaded resourcefulness. Repeatedly sexualised and sidelined, she uses her feminine wiles as a weapon against enforced passivity, and her willingness to "go all the way" for the resistance is just the tip of iceberg in terms of the indignities borne in silence - or shame - by the women unfortunate to live through male-dominated conflicts.
Who would have thought the man responsible for Showgirls and Hollywood's most famous beaver shot would make a film about those who slept with the enemy in order to survive, knowing they wouldn't ever be forgiven? Perhaps it's his way of saying sorry.
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