Japan Navigator

In the US, you are only as good as your latest succes and after three failures, Paul Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands to make a new film on native soil. And what a film it is, Black Book, there could be no more worthy comeback! This is a film on the same level as Basic Instinct and Show Girls. Black Book took 20 years of gestation and demonstrates that Verhoeven learned how to tell a tight story in the US.

Black Book tells of the tribulations of Rachel (played magnificently by Carice van Houten), a young Jewish women, in the last years of the war. It is a superb thriller that has you all the time on the edge of your seat - and goes much deeper as well. Rachel’s parents are killed when trying to flee to Belgium, she joins the Resistance movement under the new name of Ellis de Vries, gets the assignment to befriend a German officer (played by Sebastian Koch), falls in love with him…

This short resume already shows where this film is different. Instead of the usual stark black-and-white (the Nazi’s as inhuman beasts, the Dutch as nothing but exemplary heroes, as in Verhoeven’s older Soldier of Orange), this film paints reality as it is, in various shades of grey. There are “good” Germans, just as many people in the Resistance are “false.”

And in wartime, even more so than in ordinary times, truth and reality are difficult to discern. Realities shift continually and the “good” reveal themselves suddenly as traitors - but also the other way round. People’s actions and intentions are ambiguous all the time. That is also the theme of one of the greatest Dutch novels of the 20th century, The Dark Room of Damocles by W.F. Hermans.

Another theme of the film is, that war does not end when an official armistice is declared. For Rachel and her friends, the war goes on even when crowds are dancing victory in the streets, and in fact, war seems to be the perversily “normal” human condition (we see her at the end in a Kibbutz in Israel, where gun fire is heard).

Straightlaced critics have denounced Black Book as sleazy: they for example object to the scene in prison where Rachel is smothered in a bucket of human shit by her own wardens. But what could have more actuality, considering recent history? The nakedness in the film is functional and in fact, done very artistic. On top of that, Carice van Houten is a great Verhoeven heroine, squarely in the tradition of Sharon Stone and Elizabeth Berkley…