Black Book

May 18 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 20

There’s a sort of movie-lover out there who refuses to engage with any kind of “difficult” cinema. I bet you know at least one. I have a friend who refuses to watch anything “old timey” (read: black and white films made prior to, say, 1970) because they’re “too boring.” I know another who doesn’t really engage with indie movies below a certain budget line because “no one is pretty and everyone looks like they’re having a bad time,” so I know not to suggest that, say, we take in the latest Mike Leigh joint. One of my best friends who I watch a lot of movies with has been known to doze off and disengage if there are insufficient point blank headshots in a film. The biggest bugaboo among these kinds of cinemagoers is the dreaded foreign film. They assume that anything that wasn’t bankrolled by Hollywood is going to be The Seventh Seal (1957) or something. On one level, I get it. I picked The Seventh Seal as my dreadful example for a reason. It’s slowly paced, it’s old timey and in black & white, no one is pretty and everyone looks like they’re having a bad time, and there are zero point blank headshots. It’s the epitome of a homework movie. It’s gorgeous and can expand your horizons if you give it the time to experience it, but it’s not edge-of-your-seat-popcorn-eating entertainment along the lines of, say Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

The problem with thinking about film in these hard and fast categories though is that these friends of ours are limiting themselves out of enjoying movies they would likely genuinely love. The filmgoer who won’t watch old timey movies might dismiss Citizen Kane (1941) as a boring stodgy “classic” misses out on the fact that it’s a genuine popcorn-munching hoot of a film. The low-budget hater who assumes indies are awkward and unpleasant might dismiss a film like Hairspray (1988) which does lack movie stars but absolutely dishes out silly fun. And the foreign-film hater might casually dismiss Black Book for daring to be in Dutch, despite the fact that it’s got car chases, heists, thrills, romance, boobs, and plenty of point blank headshots.

Black Book is the story of the last days of World War II through the eyes of Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a Jewish Dutch nightclub singer who has spent the war hiding from Nazi persecution. After her safehouse is destroyed, she attempts to flee abroad to permanently escape the Nazis with her family. Unfortunately, the boat taking her to Belgium is raided by the SS, who kill everyone on board with only Rachel escaping. In an attempt to get revenge, she joins a cell of Dutch anti-Nazi partisans led by the charming Dr. Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman). Assuming the gentile name Ellis de Vries and dying her hair blonde, she helps the group infiltrate the local SS office by seducing the commandant Ludvig Müntze (Sebastian Koch), but as the group gets closer to being able to release all their political prisoners and as the war draws to a close, the line between who’s on what side gets blurrier.

as a Dutch war movie you know that at some point there’s gotta be bicycles

Black Book represents the triumphant return to the Netherlands by director Paul Verhoeven. Anyone familiar with that name knows that Paul Verhoeven does not make boring movies. Paul Verhoeven might make movies with unpleasant themes like Flesh and Blood (1985) or Hollow Man (2000), or movies with… questionable acting choices like Showgirls (1995) or Starship Troopers (1997)¹, but none of those movies are boring. At his best he makes films that are wildly intense but also wildly entertaining, movies like Robocop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Black Book.

The hack joke about film audiences is that they’re easily placated by a bad film full of sex and violence. Black Book has plenty of both, but at the same time the character of how they’re portrayed on screen is substantially different from your standard grindhouse affair. When Verhoeven shoots violence, he does it in a way that doesn’t shy away from how nasty it is. If, say, Michael Bay shoots a scene with gunfire it might register as intense and possibly titillating. When Verhoeven does it, it’s horrifying. At several points we see characters who are close to Rachel being gunned down, and each time we feel the terror that Rachel feels as it happens. They’re always framed in a mid-shot. A wide shot would render the violence too abstract to be viscerally felt, and a close up would obscure the anatomical details of what happens. Veroeven’s mid shots lets us see them close enough to see each bullet impact different parts of their body as the life drains from their body.

By the same token, Black Book is very much a film about how war makes bastards of us all, and how even participating in its carnage is on some level to perpetuate its horrors. To this end, when our heroes the Dutch anti-Nazi partisans execute some daring raid it still feels horrifying to see them execute their Nazi victims. To be clear, they are Nazis, and it is legitimate for the partisans to stop their activities by any means necessary, including deadly force. At the same time the film does not let us celebrate these deaths, but forces us to take them in and morally grapple with them. This is particularly notable in a scene in which the resistance group attempts to kidnap a local businessman who is gaining the trust of local Jews in hiding only to sell them out to the SS. The kidnapping goes wrong and the group ends up killing him. Killing someone who is double crossing Jews during the Shoah is probably the most justifiable killing imaginable, and still after the Christian resistance fighter Theo pulls the trigger and ends his life he wails “I’ve ended a life. I’m doomed. I’m just as bad as the Nazis” while his compatriots drink to their success. What should be an out-and-out triumph is brought low by the reminder that to end a life, even a Nazi one, is a great evil. Black Book’s morality very clearly condemns the atrocious actions of the Third Reich and the SS, but it never stops reminding us that violence is never pretty.

At the same time, Black Book is a movie full of sexual content that it never really treats as illicit or tawdry. Rachel is a horny young woman who sleeps with several men through the course of the film, but at no point is it ever depicted as shameful or sinful, including the point where she sleeps with a literal SS-Hauptsturmführer. Every one of her sexual encounters is treated as either a rare moment of joy in the midst of a warzone or the use of a tool at her disposal for the purposes of espionage. Once Rachel infiltrates the SS office she befriends another worker there named Ronnie, who likewise is as horny as Rachel is. Once again though, the film never shames Ronnie for this, and in fact praises her for using her wiles and reputation as a good time party girl as a distraction so that Müntze can break Rachel out of captivity. When the German forces surrender and the Nazi occupation ends, there are characters who refer to women as “Nazi Whores,” but everything about the way the camera frames the women and the people who are shaming them makes it clear that the film is casting judgement on those doing the shaming, not the shamed. Tons of films are full of sex and violence, but it’s incredibly rare to find one that actively castigates the violence and celebrates the sex in the same way that Black Book does.

Even beyond its salacious content, Black Book just feels like a down the middle well executed mid-high budget blockbuster. The thrills are thrilling, the villains are villainous, the romance is romantic. The plot has twists and turns that come just fast enough to keep you on your toes but never feel gratuitous. A belief I hold of aesthetics of all kinds is that the most pleasant things to experience feel comfortable and familiar and brand new and different at the same time. Black Book pulls off this tightrope act beautifully by giving us clear stakes and a familiar setting by putting a Jewish protagonist in the midst of the European theater of World War II, but also twisting that formula just enough to keep the audience on their toes.

Also: surprisingly competent musical numbers

The animating principle of this year’s newsletter is not so much that cinema has ended in the present, but that it has balkanized to the point of no longer being the same artform I fell in love with as a younger man. There are megafranchises and there are tiny indie movies and there’s nothing in between. You couldn’t make Die Hard (1988) today. You could make Die Hard 6, but that’s not the same thing. “But Jacko,” I hear you ask, “Die Hard was a big tentpole film, everyone saw it! Bruce Willis is a huge action star! That’s as safe a megablockbuster as it gets!” which we know now because we live here in the future. In 1988 Die Hard was an attempt to make an original action movie that starred a guy who was known as a wisecracker on a network TV drama on a substantial-but-not-grossly-inflated budget. It had the ingredients of something that would get butts in seats and supply a good return on investment, but didn’t have that guarantee of being based on a massive hit videogame or being the 7th part of an extended universe franchise that would be required to get funding today.

Watching Black Book feels like watching Die Hard for the first time. It’s not high art, at least not in the sense of being a film that will ever top the Sight and Sound poll, but it’s absolutely high entertainment, the kind of thing one devours a bucket of popcorn to while hooting and hollering. Unfortunately for the kinds of people who would love it, they might never see it because it dares to be an entertaining movie that isn’t in English.

Rating: ★★★★★ I’m very in the bag for Paul Verhoeven’s whole deal and this is him at his finest. If you’ve hooted and hollered at Total Recall (1990) or relished the fact that Basic Instinct (1992) is two hours of a woman fucking around and never once finding out, this one’s for you. Be warned that as with literally every other Paul Verhoeven film there are a couple of parts that get super gnarly, but in my opinion bracing yourself for the gross-out is just part of the fun of his whole style.

Financials: May 18, 2007 was the wide US release of Black Book, the first opportunity for non-coastal elites in this country to see it. It placed at number 19 at the box office, ahead of The Namesake in its 11th week of release and behind Are We Done Yet in its 7th. Shrek The Third dominated the box office at #1 this week, taking in $121 million in its opening weekend to Black Book’s $350 thousand. Black Book would make $4 million at the US box office along with $23 million made abroad against its €16 million ($21 million USD) budget. By Hollywood math this makes it a flop, while I’m unsure if the same standards are applied to AVRO / Studio Babelsberg.

Other 2007 films opening this week:

Once: Glen Hansard stars as “the guy” and Martéka Irglová as “the girl” in a story of a pair of musicians in Dublin who have a whirlwind mutually creative and quasi-romantic affair. Normally I’m deep in the bag for both stories about musicians and Irish stuff, but in a movie primarily about songwriting you really gotta love the songs and folks, Glen Hansard’s songs don’t really do it for me. If you’re into a cetaint flavor of straight white guys with acoustic guitars maybe it’s for you, but personally I’d rather sit in a quiet room eating saltines than listen to this particular style of music. Still, Hansard and Irglová play off each other well and while I might not be into the tunes, I am very into quiet longing. ★★★☆☆

Persepolis: While Persepolis didn’t have a wide release in 2007, it did debut at the May 2007 Cannes film festival, and I will take any opportunity to revisit this film. Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis is the story of growing up in Tehran during the Iranian revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war. Simultaneously pulling no punches about the horrors of the nascent Islamic Republic but also not sensationalizing it, the film is smart, moving, and weirdly really funny. The hand drawn animation is gorgeous in a way rarely seen outside of Miyazaki films in contemporary cinema and deployed in fascinating ways that render it more than just a skilled adaptation of a comic. ★★★★★

1. yes, I know that Casper Van Diem’s performance is supposed to be wooden on purpose, but it’s still wooden