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Title: Black Book

Country: Germany, UK, Netherlands (2006)

Genre: War, Thriller, Drama

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Christian Berkel

Plot

Holland at the end of World War II: After the hideout of young jewish singer Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) got destroyed by a bomb, she joins a group of other jews trying to escape to the south of Holland, which was already liberated. However their ship gets caught by a German patrol and all jews are killed. Only Rachel survives.
Now, that she has nothing to lose, she joins the dutch resistance. As “Ellis de Vries” she starts flirting with German officer Müntze (Sebastian Koch). As a result of this flir she gets a job offered as secretary. Due to this stroke of luck, the resistance group developes a plan to free imprisoned resistance members. Unexpectedly Rachel falls in love with Müntze and therefore maneuvers herself into a life-threatening situation, as she gets suspected by the resistance group to be a traitor.

Review

The thrilling story about spying, trust and betrayal concenctrates on true experiences of different people in only few distinctive personalities. The fictional story is less about historical events, but analyzes the confusing structures of occupied Holland during the last months of war, where every step was dangerous and the decision of life or death was just a random act. Director Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Total Recall) spend years of research on the story, steadily adjusting it, until he decided to assign a female as main actress in order to bring together all the elements of the story locically and communicate those emotionally to the audience. The idea of telling the tragical events in the form of a thriller works really good. It is very pleasant that the movie doesn’t have the simple division between good and evil. Instead it takes the time to see behind the curtain of even morally questionable persons. On the other hand it exposes the one or the other hero as an opportunist. The whole story is full of surprices and it should be clear that Verhoeven is no director to deliver happy ends. He follows his rough way consequently until the end, takes the hope from all of the protagonists and leads them to the desired end of the war, which is after all only a very bitter end after all the personal losses. Typically for Verhoeven movies, there is much blood, explicit violence, nude bodies and strong emotions. And it is granted for a director of this caliber that the technical realization is first-class, too. So this film is a highly recommendable lection about history, but also about moral and decency.

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