After the flops of Showgirls<\/em> and Hollow Man<\/em>, Verhoeven went home and decided to make something thoroughly Dutch. 2006’s Black Book<\/em> was hailed<\/a> by the host of the Netherlands Film Festival as “the return of a hero.” The country\u2019s greatest director had returned to the motherland to tell the story of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. In 2008<\/a>, the Dutch public voted it the best Dutch film ever made. Yet, for all of the drama surrounding Verhoeven\u2019s exit from America, he didn\u2019t leave his Hollywood skills behind. In many ways, Black Book<\/em> is as proudly Hollywood as Showgirls<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carice van Houten plays Rachel, a Jewish woman in hiding in Nazi-occupied Netherlands who becomes involved with a resistance group in The Hague. She is tasked with infiltrating the SS headquarters and seducing the local SD commander Hauptsturmf\u00fchrer Ludwig M\u00fcntze (Sebastian Koch.) Then the unexpected happens: they fall in love, and Ludwig truly doesn’t seem to care that Rachel is Jewish. The Resistance, however, have other far crueler plans for their spy and her lover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are some impeccably Verhoeven moments in Black Book<\/em>: a close-up of Rachel bleaching her pubic hair to fully disguise her ethnicity; crawling through an avalanche of sh*t in a moment of abject humiliation; asking her Nazi lover if he thinks her breasts look Jewish. It\u2019s as vulgar as one would expect from the man for whom the concept of \u201ctoo much\u201d has never existed. Yet Verhoeven\u2019s greatest and perhaps most impish skill as a filmmaker has long been his ability to have his cake and eat it too. He can bring the pulpy trash but also revel in the restraint of so-called prestige. Black Book<\/em> is his Casablanca<\/em> in that regard: classic and classy but also drenched in bodily fluids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s not just the ceaseless viscera of it that makes Black Book<\/em> classic Verhoeven. The nervy moral ambiguity of his approach is where the true gasps are elicited. Commander M\u00fcntze is shown as kind, conflicted, and a truly dedicated lover to Rachel. He\u2019s also a Nazi. By contrast, many members of the Dutch Resistance are selfish, sadistic, and outright treacherous. A mean streak of antisemitism runs through the heart of the resistance, with the outright betrayal of many Dutch Jews seen as not only acceptable but a good business decision. Verhoeven does not undermine their great cause or go full \u201cvery fine people on both sides\u201d with the shift, but it does hammer home how victory over evil is typically built on the backs of misery and moral annihilation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Second World War is often viewed as a simple good versus evil battle, one where the villain was universally agreed upon and fought valiantly against by the heroes. This binary mindset makes for a system where all treachery and violence is justified when done for a good cause (something warfare is defined by well into the 2020s). Does knowing who is \u201cgood\u201d versus \u201cbad\u201d make us shift our sympathies, even when we see in action that which goes against our assumptions of war? Verhoeven doesn\u2019t offer easy answers, but the questions are compelling enough for him to push them to the forefront. It harkens back to his adaptation of Starship Troopers<\/em>, a mercilessly satirical adaptation of a classic sci-fi novel that played its fascistic philosophy completely straight. Victory\u2019s a lot easier to swallow when you smudge away the sharp edges and harsh choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Verhoeven is often categorized as a vulgar auteur, a filmmaker primarily known to Americans for genre efforts that push against traditionally held notions of good work and good taste. It’s never been a perfect fit for the director, although the label does hint at his unique contradictions. He’s a dedicated scholar of Jesus who also made a lesbian nun movie; a survivor of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands who made the SS Officer in Black Book<\/em> a sensitive sexy stamp collector; a lover of exploitation with a staunch moral streak. He\u2019s the director who pushed Hollywood to be the version of it that everyone assumed it could never be. His hyper-realities have inspired as much derision as devotion, and moving that sensibility of over-the-top genre mayhem to a topic as sensitive as WW2 led to plenty of accusations of bad taste. But that was always the point. What is more vulgar, more gauche, and unseemly, than being forced into a war? Sooner or later, everyone will have to roll around in the shower of shit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Black Book” is streaming on Tubi<\/a> and is available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/black-book2-1024x576.jpg\")
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