Black Book

FLICK Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct and Total Recall, has taken the skills he honed in Hollywood back to his homeland, Holland, for the first time in 20 years to create a slick, fast-paced, and at times irreverent, WWII film. Based on true accounts, the story centers on Rachel (played with perpetual intensity by Carice von Houten), a Dutch Jew, once a popular singer now waiting for the war to end. When her safe-house is bombed, she is rescued by a young boy but must then go undercover, changing her name to Ellis de Vries and seeking revenge against the Germans in a harrowing non-stop series of narrow escapes and betrayals. Verhoeven doesn’t shy away from nudity, reminding us that he also directed Showgirls, by presenting Ellis as a hotsi-totsi Nazi performer. There is no time for character study as she must do anything to survive, including dying all regions of her hair blond in order to get closer to and deceive, among others, high-ranking officer Müntze (Sebastian Koch, who was equally engaging in The Lives of Others). Traditional good-guy/bad-guy clichés are annihilated here, but the sensational, over-blown sex and violence threaten to overtake any genuine emotions that could be conveyed. The framing device, initially showing Rachel teaching on a kibbutz, serves to remind us that there will be a sigh of relief after she meanders from one perilous moment to the next. But you might be breathless after witnessing the ambitious 145 minutes of unrelenting tension. My Score: 7 out of 10.