3 September, 2006
By Lee Marshall in Venice
Source: Screendaily.com
Dir: Paul Verhoeven. Neth-Bel-Ger-UK. 140mins.
The prodigal son of Dutch cinema comes home from Hollywood with the budget, production values and the epic nonchalance of the American Way packed in his suitcase. Black Book, Paul Verhoeven’s first European film for more than 20 years, is not a particularly original piece of cinema but it is rollicking, big-budget historical entertainment of the sort that the old continent so rarely gets right these days (the liberatory applause that wrapped its press screening in Venice was mainly pride that Europe can still do this kind of thing). The brash, Hollywood treatment of the Dutch World War Two Resistance theme sometimes stretches the historical record – but then this was never supposed to be a subtle exercise.
Commerically, Black Book will be an interesting market test. It features four languages – Dutch, German, English and Hebrew – during its course, so some subtitling will be inevitable in most territories (dubbing would really kill its case about the fragile identity of the Dutch language in and out of wartime). It’s not going to be that straightforward, either, to market a feature that is not quite a committed Holocaust drama, not quite a gung-ho war film and not quite a action-adventure romp: rather this is almost a case of The Pianist meets The Third Man meets Kill Bill.
Recouping its $20m budget will need wide exposure: not a problem in Europe, where a whole raft of distributors (including Tartan in the UK and Pathe in France) have already bought Black Book, comforted no doubt by its muscular auxiliary prospects. It has yet to be sold to the US, although it has been nominated as the Dutch candidate for the foreign language Oscar, something where the Netherlands has often proved adept at making it through to the final five.
The action begins in occupied Holland during the late summer of 1944. Although the tide of war has started to turn against the Germans, this is little consolation to Jews like Rachel Stein (the ever-watchable Carice Van Houten), who sees her safe house bombed and her family gunned down while attempting to flee across the border. Rachel herself narrowly escapes, and soon hooks up with a group of Dutch resistance fighters who see her as a useful pawn for infiltrating German High Command in The Hague.
After dyeing her hair blonde and changing her name to Ellis De Vries, Rachel becomes the secretary and lover of Muntze (Sebastian Koch), a Nazi-with-a-conscience who is attempting to negotiate a secret truce with the Resistance. But when Rachel is double-crossed and accused of treachery, she is forced to go on the run from her former comrades-in-arms.
Plot switchbacks and reversals abound, and the whole thing moves along at a cracking pace. There’s a breezy brio to the exercise, refreshing in a film that touches on such dark themes; in Black Book, Verhoeven comes on like a contemporary David Lean, though the film lacks the final emotional punch of, say, Doctor Zhivago. In fact, Verhoeven and his co-writer Gerard Soeteman (who also wrote Verhoeven’s last World War Two film, Soldier Of Orange) are anxious to assure us that the heroine will come out of all this just fine: the first of the film’s bookends shows Rachel happily works on a kibbutz ten years after the end of the conflict.
The director clearly has an axe to grind with the more extreme elements of Dutch Protestant culture; the criticism is at its most strident in a lurid, gratuitously nasty scene near the end involving Rachel and a group of other prisoners accused of collaborating with the Nazis.
But overall Verhoeven’s direction is assured – and it’s backed up by an impressive range of technical contributions, from Independence Day cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub’s epic widescreen photography – enhanced by lighting that verges on the theatrical – to the crisp period costumes and production design.
The acting from the pan-European cast is solid throughout, but it’s Carice Van Houten who really compels the camera’s, and the audience’s, attention, with her ebullient account of a resourceful, fun-loving girl in a dark hour.
Production companies/backers Fu Works VIP Mediafonds Egoli Tossell Film Clockwork Pictures Motel Films Studio Babelsberg Motion Picture Investment Group VIP Medienfonds 4 AVRO
International sales ContentFilm International Dutch distribution A-Film Distribution
Executive producers Andreas Grosch Andrea Schmid Marcus Schoefer Henning Molfenter Carl Woebcken Jamie Carmichael Graham Begg Sarah Giles
Producer San Fu Maltha Jens Meurer Teun Hilte Jos van der Linden Frans van Gestel Jeroen Beker
Screenplay Paul Verhoeven Gerard Soeteman
Cinematography Karl Walter Lintenlaub
Production design Wilbert van Dorp
Editors Job ter Burg James Herbert
Music Anne Dudley
Main cast Carice van Houten Sebastian Koch Thom Hoffman Halina Reijn Waldemar Kobus Derek de Lint
