Film Reviews

Black Book (Zwartboek)

• Rating:
• Director: Paul Verhoeven
• Starring: Carice van Houten
• Details: Netherlands / Belgium / 145mins (15).

A director's attention to detail must be second to none: from the big questions (who do you cast as James Bond?), to the smaller ones (the colour of Humphrey Bogart's shoelace tips), everything has to be thought out and mulled over again and again. But obviously that doesn't apply to Paul Verhoeven. Although many Dutch people died of starvation under the Nazis, Verhoeven, in his WWII epic Black Book, has fresh-faced, smiling kids running amok through the streets with gay abandon in the background. What Verhoeven does concentrate on is getting Van Houten's kit off as often as he can and treats us to a long scene where she shaves her pubic hair in front of a mirror. So it comes as no surprise that his film ended up as an unfocussed, and often boring war movie. The story, not that Verhoeven was interested, follows a pretty young Jewish girl called Rachel (Van Houten) who joins the resistance when the Nazis massacre her family. Rachel assumes the name Ellis and goes undercover as a spy but falls in love with the German officer Muntze (Koch).After a failed attempt to rescue prisoners from a stronghold, the resistance believe they were double-crossed by Rachel and she goes into hiding. Black Book never gets going and this is down to the dreadful pacing of the script. Verhoeven tries to move things as fast as he can because he's got a lot of story to get through; but when he realises he's gone too far ahead, he stops and waits for the rest of us to catch up by having long, tiresome scenes that spell out what's happening. Unsurprisingly, this stop-start approach becomes infuriating pretty quickly. Characterisation, too, is wafer thin: from the cartoon evil Nazi to the Nazi with a heart, everything here feels like it was written by a horny Junior Cert student after reading his history book at the dinner table.

Review by Gavin Burke