Black Book

[Colin]

How is it that you can spot good directorship in a movie? Directors aren’t always responsible for many of the important components that make up a good movie. Yet so it is with Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book. Although set in Holland with sub-titles, and based loosely on a true story, the steady action and plot twists make you sit up and take notice. Something is always happening in this movie. Like the heroine says at the end, “will it ever end?”

Verhoeven has made some good, even great, movies: Hollow Man (2000), Starship Troopers (1997), Basic Instinct (1992), Total Recall (1990) and RoboCop (1987) and one bad one, Showgirls (1995).

Verhoeven has said that the first films he ever saw were the Nazi propaganda films shown to Dutch children (consider his use of the genre in "RoboCop" and "Starship Troopers"), and that the experience of occupation -- first by the Germans and then by the Allies -- shaped his sensibility. As a child, Verhoeven was forced to walk past the bodies of executed resistance fighters.

The story is about a Jewish girl in a war that brings out the worst in people, 'good' or 'bad'. The film starts out with what we already know about war: people are poor, hungry and trying to survive. No black and white. No bad or good, only individual choice, tormented by the will to survive.

The second part of the film shows that even peace brings out the worst in everybody. Verhoeven shows how ones own well-being seems to go at the cost of the well-being of another. In the morally compromised world of "Black Book," virtually everyone in the story plays a double game, hedging his bets, actually or potentially betraying his friends and colleagues.

Verhoeven is a fine director of action scenes. In Black Book however, even the horrific scenes

are presented matter-of-factly and without the impact that David Croneberg is now showing. Germans follow orders and heroes are merely trying to survive. Emotional trauma is all but invisible until the end. Verhoeven keeps the story moving within a tight timeline.

Heroine Carice van Houten did all her own singing for the movie. She speaks four languages fluently in the course of the film: Hebrew in the scenes in Israel, German with Nazi soldiers, English with Canadian army personnel, and Dutch for the majority of the film.