Zwartboek (Black Book) Review
By David Kempler
War, love, treachery, beauty and so much more.
Director Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Robocop) has previously proven he knows what he is doing behind a camera. With "Zwartboek" he shows us that he can do far more than that. He has delivered a great war film but it's not at all what you might expect.
The setting is World War II in Holland. Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) is a Dutch Jew who witnesses the slaughter of her entire family on a boat. She escapes by diving into the water and her life becomes like a ball on a pool table that keeps caroming in different directions. She ends up in the Dutch Resistance and Verhoeven puts her through a series of adventures that if you were to read about, you would find it all to be far too absurd to work as a story, but it does work. Part of the reason is that Carice Van Houten is a force of nature. She owns the screen and could arouse a man far more effectively than a lifetime supply of Viagra.
While working for the Resistance, Rachel meets Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), a high ranking Nazi official. Muntze is beguiled and who could blame him. The Resistance sees an opportunity to exploit the situation but what it evolves into is, to put it mildly, quite the surprise. Rachel takes the name Ellis de Vries and passes herself off as a singer which isn't a tough assignment for her because Rachel was that before the war interfered with her career.
Aside from the outstanding performances from everyone here, what propels "Zwartboek" is the grays of reality. Black and white characters of bad and good are in short supply here. Instead we have people who can appear to be good folks in one scene followed by their being not quite so wonderful in the very next scene, just like people you meet every day.
"Zwartboek" is everything a film should be, and more. Excitement, tension, great performances, lavishly photographed and with perfect pacing. Verhoeven has done a magnificent job and he deserves major kudos for what will probably end up his finest moment.
