2008 Woodie Awards
'Showgirls' director returns with style
By: James Hansen
Issue date: 5/3/07 Section: Review
In what could be the revitalization of his career, Paul Verhoven's "Black Book" sizzles with extraordinary action, passion, and grade A filmmaking, at least for its first two hours. Running a lightning fast 145-minutes, "Black Book" consists of all of the explosions and nudity you would find in a Hollywood blockbuster, but carries a sense of moral duty and brutal honesty that reaches beyond almost any action movie made in America.
Verhoven, essentially blacklisted from Hollywood for his direction of "Showgirls," returned to his home country to create this World War II tale of a young Jewish woman named Rachel Stein. It is 1944 and she is in hiding with a Christian family who forces her to recite the New Testament for food, until their house is bombed. Rachel is luckily away from the house where she finds a young man who is able to rescue her and bring her to safety.
A family friend puts Rachel on a boat to get her, along with others, to Belgium. However, the boat is ambushed and everyone trying to flee is killed other than Rachel, who miraculously is able to escape. She is rescued this time by a group of resistance fighters. She quickly becomes entangled in a web of deceit by disguising herself as an Aryan and sleeping with the head of the local Gestapo, Muntze. One glance at the top of her dyed hair and Muntze calls her out as a Jew but with his hands on her breasts, Rachel- (now under the pseudonym Ellis) asks him, "are these Jewish?" This is a seductive and smart answer as the relationship continues from that point. Soon, Rachel finds herself relating to and falling for Muntze. This is where the complications begin to rise and spiral out of control.
Verhoven is clearly in the depths of old-fashioned melodrama, which can be hard to buy into, but in the all around pulpy filmmaking it becomes easy to let the plot complications and cartoonish aspects slide in place of a massively entertaining story.
"Black Book" only takes a turn for the worse in its last half hour when it seems to be running on fumes. The whole film is done so quickly and hardly lets up for the audience to breathe. While this works for the early stages, the gas may have been on a little too hard because the storytelling lee-way and moral ambiguity becomes harder and harder to allow as the vulgarity of the film picks up for it crushing final half hour.
Verhoven, essentially blacklisted from Hollywood for his direction of "Showgirls," returned to his home country to create this World War II tale of a young Jewish woman named Rachel Stein. It is 1944 and she is in hiding with a Christian family who forces her to recite the New Testament for food, until their house is bombed. Rachel is luckily away from the house where she finds a young man who is able to rescue her and bring her to safety.
A family friend puts Rachel on a boat to get her, along with others, to Belgium. However, the boat is ambushed and everyone trying to flee is killed other than Rachel, who miraculously is able to escape. She is rescued this time by a group of resistance fighters. She quickly becomes entangled in a web of deceit by disguising herself as an Aryan and sleeping with the head of the local Gestapo, Muntze. One glance at the top of her dyed hair and Muntze calls her out as a Jew but with his hands on her breasts, Rachel- (now under the pseudonym Ellis) asks him, "are these Jewish?" This is a seductive and smart answer as the relationship continues from that point. Soon, Rachel finds herself relating to and falling for Muntze. This is where the complications begin to rise and spiral out of control.
Verhoven is clearly in the depths of old-fashioned melodrama, which can be hard to buy into, but in the all around pulpy filmmaking it becomes easy to let the plot complications and cartoonish aspects slide in place of a massively entertaining story.
"Black Book" only takes a turn for the worse in its last half hour when it seems to be running on fumes. The whole film is done so quickly and hardly lets up for the audience to breathe. While this works for the early stages, the gas may have been on a little too hard because the storytelling lee-way and moral ambiguity becomes harder and harder to allow as the vulgarity of the film picks up for it crushing final half hour.
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