With ‘Black Book’, director Paul Verhoeven brings his trademark excess to World War II

After he left Hollywood, the provocateur behind ‘Starship Troopers’ and ‘Showgirls’ crafted one of the most transgressive war movies ever made.

Black Book, Sebastian Koch, Carice van Houten

Sebastian Koch and Carice van Houten in ‘Black Book’. Source: Sony Pictures

Black Book may be Paul Verhoeven’s most visceral film, and that’s saying something. After all, this is man who gave us the lurid violence of RoboCop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997), the unapologetic sexuality of Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995), and frequently both together, especially in his early Dutch films like Turkish Delight (1973) and Spetters (1980).

But 2005’s Black Book, his first Dutch film since 1983’s The Fourth Man, topped what had gone before: there’s gory violence, torture, nudity, sex, and all manner of excess. And it’s made all the more uncomfortable and intriguing by being set in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II.

Verhoeven had dealt with the War previously in his career, either directly in Soldier of Orange (1977) and All Things Pass (1981), or allegorically, as in Starship Troopers. Verhoeven’s childhood in occupied Holland informed his presentation of the latter’s future fascist society and it’s interesting to speculate that the broader audience’s tendency to take his anti-fascist satire at face value compelled him to make Black Book, a comparatively straight-forward resistance thriller.

Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) in ‘Black Book’. Source: Sony Pictures

The set-up, which would later be echoed in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2011) is this: after the family sheltering her is killed, Dutch Jewish woman Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) joins the Resistance. Tasked with seducing the local Nazi commandant Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) for the cause, she finds herself falling in love with him. However, his second in command, the brutal Franken (Waldemar Kobus), is responsible for the deaths of her family, and so she is torn between her duty to the Resistance, her love for Müntze, and her desire for revenge against Franken. Add in the growing suspicion that there’s a traitor in the ranks of the Resistance, and the stage is set for a tense wartime thriller. But not like any we’ve seen before.

As a setting, World War II can encompass a wide range of approaches to genre and tone, from the derring-do of The Dam Busters (1955) to the anarchic The Dirty Dozen (1967) or Kelly’s Heroes (1970), the epic sweep of The Longest Day (1962) or A Bridge Too Far (1977), to the grim Schindler’s List (1993) or Come and See (1985). Black Book, however, is its own beast, dealing with serious matters like the Holocaust, but pulpy in tone and provocative in intent. There have been many thrilling films about partisans fighting against the Nazi regime, but there’s only one where our heroine burns herself when dying her pubic hair to disguise her Jewish heritage.

Waldemar Kobus as Franken in ‘Black Book’. Source: Sony Pictures

Fans of Verhoeven are not just used to his outrageousness, we welcome it – it’s no wonder that his latest film, the historical lesbian nun drama Benedetta, has raised such a head of steam months before its Australian release. But what troubles – and perhaps even shocks – more than Verhoeven’s liberal use of sex and violence is the murky moral relativism that Black Book is steeped in.

Although the battle lines between Resistance and Nazi are clearly drawn, the personal here is often at odds with the political. Müntze, mourning his family killed in a British bombing raid and genuinely in love with Rachel, is a sympathetic figure – and a Nazi. Various members of the Resistance network are proven to be venal, self-interested, sadistic, and sometimes downright traitorous.

In the twilight world of urban guerrillas and Gestapo informers, double agents and personal agendas, we’re asked to make our own choices about who to empathise with. Given how World War II is viewed as “the last good war”, one with clearly defined villains and an obvious black and white morality, this is more challenging than any amount of flesh and blood on display.

And yet for all that, Black Book struck a chord with audiences in its native land, being the highest-grossing domestic film in the Netherlands in 2006 – they’d vote it the best Dutch film ever in 2008. Watched today, it’s a lusty, lurid, espionage epic, but one that leaves the mind ticking over long after the last bullet-sprayed body or naked torso has left the screen.