Star Review
Dutch director Paul Verhoeven made his career combining art house sensibility and Old World perversion with all the colour and excess of the Hollywood blockbuster. After a string of B-movie misses, WWII Dutch resistance thriller Black Book is a barnstorming return to form. Reunited with scriptwriter Gerard Soeteman, with whom he made Turkish Delight, Spetters and The Fourth Man, Verhoeven is back in his element. At home in his native Holland, freed from Hollywood sensibilities, he is free to cut loose and have fun. The result is a triumph: a mix of rip-roaring action and intrigue, dastardly villains, gorgeous dames, desperate rescues, savage murders, betrayal, lust, lasciviousness and greed.
Verhoeven catapults his leading ladies into fame (Sharon Stone) or infamy (Elizabeth Berkeley), and with Carice van Houten, he has found the perfect match for his lurid sensibilities. A fatale femme extraordinaire, van Houten is outstanding as Rachel Stein, a plucky, resourceful Jewish heroine who will gamely dye her hair blonde and hop into bed with a Nazi if it will help the Dutch resistance, but who will risk her life for him if her heart tells her to.
Like Downfall and The Pianist before it, Black Book revisits the familiar morality of WWII with new eyes. The question is not who will win the war, but when. This puts both sides in an awkward position – should the resistance continue their campaign, knowing that for every Nazi sympathiser killed, there will be bloody reprisals? And should the German occupiers accept the inevitable, or redouble their efforts?
Black Book's take on the politics of resistance, in which it is plain that not all freedom fighters are noble and not all occupiers are brutes, is as provocative as it is relevant, though Verhoeven – who once dreamed of making a film about the historical life of Christ – is well aware that there are no easy answers in history and politics, and never bogs the story down looking for them.
Milo Wakelin on 12th March 2007
View all 39 of Milo Wakelin’s reviews
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Film Description
Paul Verhoeven’s epic World War Two drama about a young Jewish woman who joins the Resistance in The Hague and gets entangled in a deadly web of double-dealing and betrayal. With production of the film delayed for 20 years, this stunning, sexy thriller from the internationally acclaimed director of Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and Total Recall, with a star-making debut from Carice Van Houten. The film also marks Verhoeven’s return to the Netherlands after 23 years.
[ Show Star Review ]
Some have described this remarkable WWII drama as the director’s return to form in his native Holland – but the director’s American career included such impressive fare as Starship Troopers. Nevertheless, this riveting synthesis of art film and pulse-racing war adventure features a career-defining performance by Carice Van Houten. < less
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Black Book
