In Holland, as in other occupied countries, acts of resistance were carried out with exemplary coolness. You could take this, I guess, as a convincing dramatization of courage. After her first encounter with Müntze, on a train (he offers to carry her bags, unaware that they are stuffed with weapons), she strolls away down the platform with a puff of relief on her lips. Such is the template to which Verhoeven cleaves: no suffering is so dire that it cannot be endured and then erased, to be replaced-in Rachel’s case-with an indomitable smile. Rachel, though shot in the head, swims to safety, with the wound diminishing swiftly to a nasty graze and, one scene later, to an unblemished brow. The first inkling that this might not be so comes with the attack on the barge. It is the first film that he has made in his native Holland in more than twenty years it is also said to prove that he has put away childish things-“RoboCop,” “Basic Instinct,” “Showgirls,” and the other baubles of his Hollywood years. Her fate should hang in the balance, but, since the opening scene of the film shows her teaching in a kibbutz in 1956, the scales are decisively tipped.Īccording to rumor, “Black Book” marks a purified moment in the career of Paul Verhoeven. By this stage, the war is over, with Allied troops being fêted in the streets and the unfortunate Rachel accused of collaboration. Somebody within the Resistance is in league with the Germans for more than two hours, Verhoeven keeps us on what he believes to be tenterhooks before revealing the villain. How, one might ask, did he rise to his present position? Did he torture his suspects with a pair of philatelist’s tweezers?įrom here, the film is entwined in double crosses, strokes of luck, and panicky exchanges of gunfire. Here she is allotted the task of seducing Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch), the courteous, stamp-collecting head of the local Gestapo. They are betrayed and slaughtered Rachel alone escapes, and joins the Dutch Resistance. She hides out with a farmer’s family, then teams up with her own relatives and tries to flee the country on a barge. It charts the efforts of a young Jewish woman named Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) to survive and prosper. The new Paul Verhoeven film, “Black Book,” is set almost entirely in Holland during the later stages of the Second World War. KARL WALTER/COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS Sebastian Koch and Carice van Houten in Paul Verhoeven’s new movie.
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