The Case for a Book in Black

Another International Film Festival film comes back for a general release. And I was there, having heard good reviews about Paul Verhoeven’s film Black Book. Set at the end of the Second World War in the occupied Netherlands, the film follows the fairly depressing and tragedy laden life of a young Jewish woman trying to both flee and revenge herself on the Nazi forces and Dutch collaborators and traitors. In the process, lots of people die, there is a bit of nudity and sauciness (this is a Paul Verhoeven film, of course), the main characters speak 3 or 4 different languages fluently, and everything looks gorgeous (if wonderfully shot torture scenes can ever really be described as “gorgeous”).

And a long film it was too, spanning two and a half hours, though the time only really dragged in some of the latter chase scenes. The lead actress, Carice van Houten, was stunning in several senses of the word, and the film was the poorer when she wasn’t in it (which wasn’t often, thank goodness). The traumas and torments her character suffered were harrowingly portrayed, as was the prejudice that still underlined relations between some resistance fighters and the Jewish community. The woman seemed to attract bad luck no matter where she went, and that got a bit repetitive after a while in a Murphy’s Law kind of way. Thus the film’s final climax, as betrayal mounted on betrayal and misdirection leading to betrayal, got a wee bit torturous for the wrong reasons.

This was a great film, hampered only by its overdrawn ending and its very familiar subject matter (resistance v Nazis). The musical score was also distracting in that I found it very similar to what I remember of the score from Top Secret!, which kind of undermined the seriousness of the scenes in Black Book in which the score was employed. So while I think The Lives of Others, featuring the same leading German actor, was the superior film, Black Book is definitely up there.

Verdict: A fairly depressing film beautifully rendered and acted, this one gets 4 pairs of clogs out of 5 pairs (or 8 clogs out of 10)