Review: Black Book

The film is designed to please fans of Soldier of Orange and Showgirls, and perhaps to apologize for their transgressions.

Black Book
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Designed to please fans of Soldier of Orange and Showgirls (and perhaps to apologize for their transgressions), Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book may end up disappointing everyone. Based on true events but not a true story (at least according to a sly Verhoeven), the film imagines Nomi Malone’s vagina dentata laying waste to the Nazis. This is an enticing proposition, except this voluptuously directed epic crumbles beneath the weight of its well-oiled but mechanical plot. Clarice van Houten is Rachel, a pretty young Jewish girl whose hideout in the Netherlands is bombed while she sunbathes on a nearby wharf. With the help of a man who claims to be part of the resistance, she goes deeper into hiding only to see her entire family (and boyfriend) shot down by the SS. From there it’s one impossible close call after another, a two-hour-plus thrill ride that has Rachel joining forces with the resistance, changing her name to Ellis and dying her hair (and pubes) in order to spy on the Nazis, and falling in love with a high-ranking SS officer. Staked to the rafters with double-crossings and red herrings (no stamp collection or chocolate bar will be without purpose), Black Book does not starve for intrigue, but its thrust can be exhausting. Because Verhoeven allows for little feeling between his tightly-wound set pieces, asking us to marvel at the film’s machinations as we might a cute boy or girl thrusting up against a pinball machine (which is to say with great physical desirability but a discernable lack of emotional attachment), the characters do not scan beyond archetypes. (From the periphery of Ellis’s adventures, we catch flip cartoon glimpses of characters suffering through personal crisis, as in the young Catholic man who goes berserk after he kills a man for cursing.) Verhoeven is interested in the idea of Ellis’s sexual agency as a weapon of mass destruction but doesn’t care to clarify where the woman’s natural feminine wile ends and where her artificial Mata Hariness begins. And though there is always a sense that Ellis is exercising her leverage as a woman on her own terms, it’s still a confounding road from the moment she hitches up her skirt to tease a cat-calling group of soldiers and the humiliating spectacle of a cauldron of shit being dumped on her naked body. In the end, she is not unlike the film itself—a creature of fierce action but vague instincts.

Score: 
 Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn, Waldemar Kobus, Derek de Lint, Christian Berkel, Dolf de Vries, Peter Blok, Michiel Huisman, Ronald Armbrust, Frank Lammers, Matthias Schoenaerts, Johnny de Mol, Xander Straat, Diana Dobbelman, Rixt Leddy, Lidewij Mahler, Pieter Tiddens, Gijs Naber, Dirk Zeelenberg, Michiel de Jong  Director: Paul Verhoeven  Screenwriter: Gerard Soeteman, Paul Verhoeven  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 146 min  Rating: R  Year: 2006  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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