Black Book
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Some critics are hard-wired to praise any movie that deals with Nazis (Pauline Kael called them “Nazi junkies”) as if that subject automatically made a movie profound. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven tempts that fallacy in Black Book, the story of a young Jewish woman, Rachel (Carice van Houten), whose career as a singer is interrupted when the Nazis invade Holland. Verhoeven gives Rachel’s struggle to survive the soap opera treatment—epic ordeals involving changed identities, the Dutch underground, then espionage routines that require her to sleep with an S.S. officer, Ludwig (Sebastian Koch), with whom she falls in love.
These narrative extremes, combining romanticism with satire, test the tolerance of Nazi junkies who have, predictably, responded to Black Book with either knee-jerk praise or plain-jerk distaste. But Black Book is fun, above all, because it works in Verhoeven’s typically naughty-provocative style. Its success must be measured in how it enables viewers to think about war and survival in new ways—without shopworn, Oscar-endorsed sentiments. Imagine a Fassbinder movie, deliberately self-conscious for the new century. Rachel suggests Maria Braun or Lili Marleen only not simply transplanted to The Netherlands (lewd name for a Verhoeven location) but to the realm of comic books—oops! graphic novels—to use a term that implies Verhoeven’s Pop Art boldness.
Verhoeven’s outrageous storylines (Showgirls, Starship Troopers) travesty politics but not seriousness. Rachel’s situation is always grave, yet Verhoeven (co-writing with Gerard Soeteman) is often humorous about it. He can untap a character’s rebel libidinous streak or the absurdity of a grim circumstance, as in a moment sure to be famous—and destined to be misunderstood—when desperate Rachel rides on a motorcycle past a line of marching Nazi soldiers and flashes her thighs at them. The sense of personal liberation in that gesture isn’t just impudent, it defies historical sanctimony.
Such audacious incidents might have gotten Black Book past Kael’s objections to WWII mawkishness which (after Eastwood’s insufferable diptych) is now out of hand. But the interest of Rachel’s unruly behavior—and Verhoeven’s disturbing madcap storyline—lies in how it makes one look at the issues of Rachel’s ordeal with exhilarating freshness. Black Book’s historically-loaded situation and metaphorical images (gold coins gleam against the naked breasts of a woman killed when Nazis ambush wealthy Jews attempting escape) are presented with Verhoeven’s signature insouciance. The tragic/vulgar effect is not meaningless as in a comic book movie like 300; rather, Verhoeven raises new issues, provokes more thought. Black Book’s legitimacy comes from Verhoeven’s willingness to push history into the surreal.
At one point Rachel escapes the Gestapo in a coffin. Her mock resurrection sets up a joke that, when repeated, will be dire. But as she nails a bad guy in a coffin, the Grand Guignol cliché is made comic, horrific and moral. Verhoeven’s audacity can be alarming (especially to American tastes still shocked by his casual approach to frontal nudity) yet Black Book’s narrative efficiency and richness recall Robert Aldrich’s underrated The Dirty Dozen. The pleasure of Aldrich’s foil-the-Nazis plot always distracted from his vision of the Dozen’s complexes. Verhoeven shares Aldrich’s pop depth. He exposes Rachel’s psyche by way of an outrageously energized, divaricating plot. Situations that might seem bluntly decadent (Rachel dying her pubic hair blonde to pass for an Aryan while her male comrade lusts after her—to the tune of “Red Sails in the Sunset”) unsettle such resistance-movie pieties as in the dreary, solemn Army of Shadows.
Verhoeven’s narrative effrontery updates the moral quandary of war movies. When Black Book’s resistance fighters are called “terrorists,” it’s clear Verhoeven knows that stakes have changed today. Yet Rachel’s genuine affection for Ludwig complicates the matter of allegiance. Verhoeven realizes that wartime alliances can be confoundingly personal. He won’t let old sentimentality prevail.
“You’re as bad as the Nazis!” a crowd of Liberation Day rioters are told when they vent their anger on Rachel. This is irony that an Army of Shadows encourages us to forget by reducing politics to simplistic melodrama. Verhoeven’s audacious comic tone provides intellectual distance (helped by the mercurial van Houten’s uncanny resemblance to Christina Aguilera’s retro look). It takes Rachel’s dilemma of identity and sacrifice out of the past—avoiding the Nazi junkie trap—and into the present.
