Zwartboek (Black Book)

[MacGuffin]

International Trailer here.

Starring: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Halina Reijn, Thom Hoffman, Hans Kesting, Jochum ten Haaf

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Premise: The story of a German Jewish girl who narrowly survives the war in Holland and shortly after the liberation, tries to find out who betrayed her family.

[MacGuffin]

Dutch director returns to roots with dark Nazi film

Paul Verhoeven, best known for Hollywood hits "Basic instinct" and "Total Recall," has returned to his native Netherlands with a film challenging the view that the anti-Nazi resistance there was a movement only for heroes.

"Black Book" was inspired by real events and characters, and seeks to undermine movie stereotypes of evil Fascist forces, heroic resistance fighters and powerless Jewish victims.

In the film a Gestapo commander is portrayed as a man with compassion and morals who has an affair with a young singer who infiltrates his Amsterdam headquarters, even though he knows her to be a Jew.

The singer who risked everything to help the resistance is treated as a traitor by the Dutch after the liberation.

"No one has ever shown how in 1945 we treated our prisoners," Verhoeven said.

He said his first picture in six years was an attempt to portray the brutality of humankind.

"It is difficult to imagine there is an enormous amount of hope available to humankind," he told a news conference after the film's first screening on Friday. Black Book is one of 21 films in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

"Among ourselves we have killed 150 million people (in the twentieth century)," he added. "Humans are often animals to each other."

That depravity is clear in the film, which was shot in the Netherlands on a budget of around 17 million euros.

BETRAYAL

Wealthy Jews are betrayed by local collaborators and slaughtered by Nazi forces for their jewels and money. Resistance fighters are cruelly tortured and executed.

But equally disturbing is the betrayal and deceit within the resistance movement, which has tragic consequences.

Verhoeven said he wanted to challenge movie stereotypes of the conflict.

"What I have been doing is opening up dirty bits that were part of reality and situated my story there," said Verhoeven. "Most of these things are found in little booklets that have come out in the last 20 years."

"It used to be conventional wisdom that the Dutch and the resistance were heroes and the Germans and their Dutch sympathizers were villains," he added in production notes for the film. "People were neither heroes nor villains."

The black book of the title is based on the real-life diary of a lawyer in the Hague who negotiated between the Nazis and the resistance but who was killed just after liberation.

"(His) black book, which probably contained names of traitors and collaborators -- all the way to the top -- was never found."

Verhoeven said he was glad to get away from Hollywood, where he said the emphasis was on pure entertainment with too little depth.

"It's true that after the last movie I did in Los Angeles I felt as empty as the movie, in fact," he said, referring to his 2000 film "Hollow Man."

"I was trying to find something attractive, to me personally, closer to my heart."

[MacGuffin]

Domestic Trailer

[MacGuffin]

'Of course there are nude scenes ... I'm Dutch!'
Would you trust the man who brought us Showgirls and RoboCop to make a film about the betrayal and murder of Dutch Jews in the second world war? Director Paul Verhoeven talks to Stuart Jeffries
Source: The Guardian

'Some Dutch critics have said that my film is superficial, perverted, decadent," says Paul Verhoeven as he slathers bread with pâté in De Posthoorn, a pleasant cafe in The Hague. "Ach!" he says, shrugging his shoulders and filling his mouth. "Don't they know I have heard these criticisms before? It was the same for me in Hollywood, isn't it?"

Verhoeven, for all his years in Hollywood, can't help saying "isn't it?" every two minutes. The sweet ghost of a Dutch idiom haunts much of what he says during the two hours I spend in his engaging company. It proves hard not to like, isn't it?

But what Verhoeven says is true. His Hollywood years were filled with critical roastings that would have made weaker men give up the movies. This is the man who made Showgirls (1996), which Variety called "impossibly vulgar, tawdry and coarse ... akin to being keelhauled in a cesspool". "After that they would only let me direct science fiction," says Verhoeven, "not normal films - if you can call Showgirls normal."

This is the director of Basic Instinct (1992), a picture summed up by the Washington Post as a "sleekly made skin-flick, an extended Hustler magazine fantasy whose heroine isn't a little butch, she's metaphorically male".

In Basic Instinct, Verhoeven created some of the most seamily memorable images in recent cinema (Sharon Stone seductively crossing and uncrossing her legs before Michael Douglas and a roomful of drooling coppers) and got slapped by his leading lady for doing so.

This is the man whose Hollywood career seems to have come to an end with Hollow Man (2000), a sci-fi picture with terrific special effects damned by critic Roger Ebert's faint praise: "At some kind of mechanical level I suppose the movie works." Verhoeven himself said: "After Hollow Man, I felt as empty as the movie was."

Verhoeven says his Hollywood career was stymied not just by the big boob that was Showgirls, but because of the collapse of independent studios such as Orion that allowed him to work relatively freely. "Their only demand was that I would accept the actor they had chosen. They would contact the actor - say Arnold [Schwarzenegger] in Total Recall, or Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct - themselves and he would be aboard before me. After that I was free. But when these companies went bankrupt, I realised I had nowhere to go. I hadn't made a really solid network of actors or been to enough networking parties. I had forgotten to do that."

To be fair, Verhoeven is also the director of three of the most thrilling sci-fi films ever made - RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997). But, really, is this the guy who you'd want to helm a film that deals with such sensitive matters as the murders of Dutch Jews during the second world war or to explore the vexed question of the allegedly inhuman postwar treatment of Dutch people who collaborated with Nazis? Many Dutch people believe it is. One million of them have seen Verhoeven's wartime thriller Black Book since its release last September. There are only 16m Dutch people. "That's nearly as many as saw Pirates of the Caribbean, isn't it?" says Verhoeven. And at the Dutch film awards last year, the picture scooped a clutch (maybe that should be herd) of Golden Calves.

"People have called it a comeback," says Verhoeven, who had a career in the Netherlands before he was sucked into Hollywood's orbit. "I don't know if that is the right description, perhaps it is. But at least I have come back to myself. That's what I felt when I made this film." Not since 1973 has Verhoeven been so successful with a Dutch-language film.

As if to clinch the point about Verhoeven's triumphant homecoming, halfway through the interview, a stranger comes up to our table and says something in Dutch. Verhoeven translates: "He just said: 'You are one of the few people in Holland I am proud of.'"

What is making Dutch people proud - and go to the pictures - is that Black Book is a populist thriller about an episode in Holland's history that makes Verhoeven's countrymen and women seem not so much like the relaxed sexually liberated funsters of myth, but a people as capable of venality as everybody else. "There have been no complaints about what the film says about the resistance or what we did to the Jews, because everyone knows it's the truth. People would get 10 guilders (or five euros) for telling where a Jew was," says Verhoeven. "Some people in the resistance and the police did that. Everything was there: there were people who didn't care about the Jews, people who wanted to help, people who sold them to the Nazis, and people who really refused - like anywhere, isn't it? Statistically the Dutch had the highest percentage of Jewish people who were led away. You can't say there was an enormous effort by the Dutch to do anything about it." Only 30,000 of the 140,000 Dutch Jews survived the war. "They were mostly dead before my film starts. Black Book starts in late 1944, but they were mostly dead by 1943. Only a few survived longer - Anne Frank, for example, was arrested in the spring of 1944."

Black Book takes place in the months before and immediately after the collapse of Nazi occupation. It focuses on Rachel Steinn, a beautiful Jewish revue singer eluding the Germans after she sees her family slain by a Nazi patrol boat as they try to escape to Allied territory. She joins the Resistance in The Hague and then falls for the Nazi she is assigned to seduce. Like you do. Indeed the film's aesthetic and ethical choices might make some queasy.

But then, this auteur has no hauteur; nor, more importantly, is he Jewish. Rather, he is an atheist who had a bout of Pentacostalist fervour in his mid-20s that still inflects his work and thinking: he still reads widely about Christian history; he considers RoboCop to be a Christ-like story of resurrection.

Verhoeven's brash blockbuster sensibility and his trademark fondness for cinematic sex and violence are deployed heavily in Black Book, an approach that made critics brand him perverted. "Of course there are nude scenes," he announces loudly across De Posthoorn. "I'm Dutch!"

There is even an homage to that scene in Basic Instinct, when Rachel dyes her pubic hair blonde so as not to arouse Nazi suspicions. And then, as Verhoeven holds the crotch shot much longer than he would have been allowed to do in Hollywood, an aroused resistance fighter moves in to fondle her breasts.

Promoting the film in Israel recently, Verhoeven was asked how he felt about connecting the Holocaust with sexual pornography. "I had a hard time understanding the question. In any case, my film isn't really about the Holocaust. So I asked the interviewer if he believed the premise and he said no." Understandably: after all, what Verhoeven has done is to make a wartime thriller with a Jewish heroine; Black Book is hardly The Night Porter.

"But my film is controversial in Jerusalem because I do not believe the Holocaust was a sacred singularity and I have no problem linking the story of a Jew during war with sex or with the history of the Resistance. The Holocaust for me was a fact in history, a terrible fact, but a fact all the same."

What moral vision do you bring to this historical material? "We all should realise that we live in an extremely violent universe, isn't it?" replies Verhoeven. "If you look at the sky with the Hubble telescope, you will see galaxies hitting each other. Just think of the amount of life that every moment is being destroyed. It is basically our destiny to be destroyed. So before you say the Nazis are bad, you have to say the whole universe is full of violence, isn't it?"

One of the film's chief allegations is that the Dutch treated presumed wartime collaborators as contemptibly as the Nazis treated Jews, and Verhoeven says he found the evidence that they did in Dutch official archives in 1967. In the picture, there is a scene in which presumed Nazi collaborators incarcerated in the Scheveningen prison are humiliated by Dutch guards and day trippers. "On Sundays if you paid a couple of guilders, you could come and humiliate them," says Verhoeven. "What they would normally do is throw bottles on the floor and make the prisoners walk through the glass. It was in the script but I took it out because I thought it was too much."

Was it hard to believe the Dutch could do such things? "Yes, I felt amazement and disgust and anger. How was it possible that we behaved as bad as the Nazis? If you look at the pictures, you wouldn't have wanted to be at their mercy."

The story of Black Book was personal for Verhoeven. He was born in 1938 and brought up in The Hague during the war. He and his childhood friend Gerard Soeteman, his scriptwriter, dreamed of making Black Book for several decades to dramatise what happened when they were too young to fully understand it. Most of the characters, he says, are based on real people. The Nazi lover, for example, is based on the head of the intelligence arm of the SS in The Hague. "He was a pretty OK German who was trying to prevent further bloodshed. Because the Resistance was shooting any soldier they saw. It felt like Baghdad a little bit. The Germans would retaliate. They would take 10 or 15 political prisoners to the point where a German was killed and they would kill them. Then they would force the Dutch people to look at the bodies, to scare them. I remember this happening on a street near my house. I saw a lot of bodies when I was a kid. The OK German thought this was mad, especially because the war was nearly over. So he tried, as I show in the film, to broker a deal with the resistance to stop the killing."

Could you have made this film in Hollywood? "I don't think so. They would have toned it down. They might have even thought this treatment of prisoners after the war - which is a little bit Abu Ghraiby, isn't it? - is too much and cut it out. Hollywood would have diminished the dangerous things, they would have tried to avoid possible protests from the beginning and make other people more heroic to balance things out. The way I did it is, in my opinion, pretty European. It isn't trying to create ultimate heroes, although I still feel that the girl is pretty heroic."

Black Book has been nominated for the best foreign language Oscar: winning it might reopen doors double-locked and bolted against the maverick Dutchman. Would you like to work in Hollywood again? "I would say I go where the best script is. My trip to Europe was partly provoked by trying to get away from science fiction."

Verhoeven's recent years have been littered with projects that never quite got off the ground. For ages he planned to do a film about Hitler's rise. There is a script about the first crusade. "Arnold has it. Maybe when he has finished as governor he might want to be in it, or maybe produce it. But Ridley Scott may have ruined it for me because of Kingdom of Heaven. In Hollywood if you make a movie that's not so good in a particular genre, then that genre is verboten for 10 years. So probably no crusades picture with Arnold for a while."

Instead, he hopes this year to start filming an adaptation of Boris Akunin's Russian detective novel The Winter Queen, set in 19th century St Petersburg. While he waits for the film's forbiddingly complex Euro-financing to be put in place, Verhoeven is writing a book about Jesus. "I treat him as a normal man and debunk the myths that surround him. The resurrection? Couldn't happen. Virgin birth? Couldn't happen. I bring my respect for science and historical fact to bear on this myth.

"I want to make a movie using my research on this, but my friends said: 'Don't do that. They will shoot you in the US.' So I'm writing the book, which may be less risky." A worried look flits across Verhoeven's face. "Of course, they might shoot me for even writing the book." That would be unfortunate. "Yes it would. I quite like shocking people, but I don't want to be shot dead just yet, isn't it?"

[Mikey B]

'Of course there are nude scenes ... I'm Dutch!'-Verhoeven

This is all I need to see a Verhoeven Film. Joking. But this film really sounds like something great, consider me in line for it.

[RegularKarate]

I fell asleep three times during it.

[modage]

i stayed awake during this.  saw it a few weeks ago with Verhoeven in attendance (and samsong!) and i really liked it.  from Verhoeven i almost thought it would be more violent or sexy or 'edgy' somehow than it was, but it was a little more Hollywood than i expected.  which is ironic since its dutch, and the first non-english film of his that i've seen.  there are some interesting conventions that he gets to play with though, like having a jew fall in love with a nazi officer and having that officer be sympathetic!  so i liked it.  its not ultraviolent, and aside from a brief glimpse of pube dying its not really that sensational but its a pretty damn good true story. 

the highlight though was getting my (criterion) robocop dvd signed and telling him that my dad brought me to see it when i was 6 and he had NO IDEA what he was getting us into.  because really, how could you in those days?  there wasnt internet and the mpaa didnt say why something was rated what it was, so when we saw the standup in the theatre lobby of robocop getting out of his car and thought "we have to see this movie" who could've been prepared for the level of grotesque (and awesome) violence and profanity that followed.  ahhh, memories. 

[MacGuffin]

Black Book is one of the complex, emotionally wrenching and beautiful films of the decade. It is the story of a Dutch Jewish woman Rachel Stein [played by Carice Van Houten] during the final years of the Nazi regime. When her family is murdered right in front of her, the Dutch Resistance asks her to seduce Ludwig Müntze the head of the Dutch Gestapo in order to gain information. When Stein falls in love with Müntze she must learn to reconcile her love with this man who may have helped kill her family and meanwhile there is a spy in the resistance who has teamed with the Nazis to become war profiteers. Now American audiences may be surprised to learn that the film was co-written and directed by action auteur and Dutch native Paul Verhoeven best known for Robocop and Basic Instinct. But before Verhoeven made the sojourn to Hollywood he was best known for the thrillers Turkish Delight, Spetters and The Fourth Man. Black Book is very much a throwback to his previous films and I got a chance to talk with the man himself in New York City.

Daniel Robert Epstein: I've seen most of your movies and I found this to be your most complex work, almost like a novel. Is that what you were going for?

Paul Verhoeven: Yeah, I think so but it's very visual so it's not very literary but it is certainly complex and has many layers. I think it has to do with the historical situation of that time. There were a lot of things going on at the same time and the last half-year of the war was extremely strange, especially in the city of The Hague where I was living. The film is situated in The Hague, which was also the center of the German government. There was an enormous amount of ambiguity at that time in all groups. The Germans themselves were already realizing they were losing the war. How would they protect themselves? How could they get out of the country? What could they take with them? Basically, how could they be satisfied although they lost the war. Then the Dutch population had been collaborating with the Germans. Many women had been sleeping with German soldiers. All that really came together in that last year in northern Holland because the southern part was already liberated in September 1944 but the northern part was liberated in May '45. So there was a half year in between where there was a lot of suffering in the northern part because there was no food. If you create a story set in that time it would be very strange if it were not complex. In fact, we chose that period because we loved the complexity. My scriptwriter [Gerard Soeteman] and I always felt that people under that kind of pressure are really living an existential life because every decision is extremely important. The worst and the best come out. It is a very illuminating period about what people are willing to do to each other to survive.

DRE:Some of your best known films are about women manipulating powerful men, what attracts you to that idea?

Paul:Who is she manipulating here?

DRE:She's trying to manipulate Müntze.

Paul:Yeah, she is trying to seduce him but then she falls in love. She is not manipulating like the girls in Showgirls or Spetters, which is for profit. She's not opportunistic, she's asked by the head of the Resistance, Mr. Kuipers, if she will sleep with Müntze. So she really does it for altruistic reasons. Kuipers' son was arrested and he will be executed so he wants her to sleep with him so the Resistance can get information of how to get the son out of prison. She goes there clearly not out of opportunity, which is everything the main girls in Spetters or in Showgirls or even Sharon Stone [in Basic Instinct] is not.

DRE:Costa-Gavras did a movie called Amen about a German man that tries to tell the Vatican about what the Nazis are doing and Roman Polanski did The Pianist where a Nazi saves a Jew in hiding. Are movies like Black Book and these other films, filmmakers looking back for anything good in the Nazis?

Paul:No, this guy was okay. Müntze is based on a real person and he was exactly that person. He was negotiating with the Resistance to avoid bloodshed exactly like in the movie. He was really trying to make a deal with the Resistance because there were lots of Resistance fighters who would snipe and shoot at German officers mostly. Then at the command of Hitler, the Germans had to take political prisoners out of jail and execute them as reprisal. This was beginning to be a normal situation. So what the real Müntze was trying to do was negotiate with the Dutch Resistance so they would stop sniping at the German soldiers so the Germans would not retaliate anymore. That's in the movie and that's the truth. I wasn't looking for good. I'm certainly not well known for looking for good. I just found an interesting story.

DRE:I spoke to Takashi Miike a few years ago and I was surprised to find out that his favorite film is Starship Troopers.

Paul:That's very nice. I always thought the movie was badly understood. There was an article in The Washington Post when it came out that was not written by a movie critic. One of the editors wrote it saying that this was a neo-Nazi movie and I was promoting Fascism. That same article was published in all the European newspapers. When I went to do the publicity tour in Europe, everybody was already looking through that lens. The Washington Post is not a reliable newspaper anyway but they said the film was written by a neo-Nazi or a Fascist and directed by one. I strongly disagree with that. I saw it as a critique of American society. It is done in an ironic way but not pushing it very hard, which I hate because then it becomes dogmatic and becomes something else other than filmmaking. It was more that the novel by Robert Heinlein is very militaristic and has a tendency to be pro-Fascist a bit. We took a lot of cues out of American society at that time, which was [President Bill] Clinton, not realizing that a couple years later this whole situation would be much more acute and now you can put the film as a blueprint over Iraq or Afghanistan. But of course, I didn't know of bin Laden at that time.

DRE:Are you still part of the Jesus Seminar?

Paul:Yes, I'm going there tomorrow.

DRE:What do you think about James Cameron and finding this tomb?

Paul:A Dutch journalist called me this morning about that. He said, "What do you think?" I said, "Did they do a statistical investigation because all of these names Mary, Jesus, whatever were so well known?" Then I read this morning in USA Today that they did that and that the chances that it is a coincidence are 1 in 600. 600 is nothing, now if it were one chance in ten million, I would probably say, "Well this might be true." But in this case 1 in 600 doesn't mean anything. I think ultimately it's not a hoax. I think they are not aware of the fact that the name Mary was used by 25% of the female population. So I think it's a wrong interpretation. Of course, that Jesus was buried in some way and did not walk out of his grave is true. He stayed and he died. According to a very famous theologian Dominic Crossan, he thinks that the body was thrown in a mass grave and eaten by the dogs. It says in one of the gospels, not one that's in the New Testament the one called Apocrypha in the Gospel of Philip, that Jesus often kissed Mary Magdalene on the lips. But that may be a result of some Christians feeling that there was a need to bring some sexuality into the Gospel or whatever. For me personally, I don't think that Jesus, at that time of his life, was really much into sex. He was very much into God.

[Redlum]

This had me gripped for the whole 2 hours.

Like Modage, I enjoyed it more than I should thanks to its slight twists on the conventions of the genre. At times it felt like "Raiders" but this was due to good pacing and well woven action sequences.

I think this is the superior Resistance Heroine, Espionage Thriller of recent years; exceeding "Charlotte Gray" and "Lucie Auabraq".

On the downside - its bookends ultimately feel tacked on despite providing an intruiging lead-in to begin with.