Drawn from true events, Black Book follows an extraordinarily resourceful Jewish cabaret singer, Rachel Stein (played by the remarkable Carice van Houten), as she attempts to flee Holland, sees her entire family slaughtered before her, joins the resistance, and eventually finds herself assigned to seduce a high-ranking Nazi officer (Sebastian Koch), with whom she promptly falls in love. And things only get grayer from there. With its litany of traitorous double agents, peace-minded Nazis, and ordinary Dutch civilians hoping to save their own skins by playing both sides against the middle, Black Book serves, like Clint Eastwood's recent Letters From Iwo Jima, as a powerful corrective to absolutist notions of wartime heroism and villainy. Or, as Verhoeven puts it, "It was not that the resistance was wonderful and heroic and all the Germans were diabolical and devilish. This is a silly proposal. I felt that the movie should break that."
If that makes Black Book sound like an atypical effort from a director best known for his inspired weddings of comic-book violence to tongue-in-cheek social satire, Verhoeven hasn't exactly gone all stodgy and "respectable" on us. Like so many Verhoeven protagonists — from the two Amsterdam fantasy madams of his feature Business Is Business to Basic Instinct's ice-pick-wielding authoress Catherine Trammel — Rachel Stein is a young woman who uses mind and body alike to make her way through an oppressive, male-dominated society. And with its locomotive pacing and Hitchcockian twists of fate, Black Book may well be the first movie about the Holocaust that can also be called a nonstop, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride.
"I think this kind of plotting, this narrative that is so compelling and driving, doesn't come from Europe," says Verhoeven, who co-authored the Black Book script with Gerard Soeteman (the writer or co-writer of all of Verhoeven's Dutch films). "It comes from 20 years of working in the United States . . . There's a certain element of entertainment, which can be condemned if you see the movie completely from a Holocaust perspective. But while the movie is about the Holocaust, it's also about the Dutch resistance, and about opportunistic behavior."
Verhoeven's comments are a reminder that few in cinema outside of the late Japanese master director Shohei Imamura have shown a greater attraction to the lower depths of the human psyche and our animalistic urges of lust, desire, and revenge. "You know that our DNA chains are something like 98 percent similar to chimpanzees," he says, "and chimpanzees are quite aggressive. But there's also this other animal, the bonobo, that's a nice animal, also an ape, and we have a little bit of that too." That Darwinian sensibility achieves perhaps its most unsettling and resonant expression in Black Book's gut-wrenching third act, as accused war criminals and suspected traitors are treated to humiliating reprisals lacking in due process or simple human decency. "It's Abu Ghraib, isn't it?" Verhoeven asks rhetorically. "Or the French in Algeria? Everyone's so upset, as they should be, about Abu Ghraib, but we should not think that the Americans are the only ones that have done these things."
Such scenes, says the director, are just one of the reasons he could never have made Black Book in Hollywood. "Not in the same way. To tell the American studios that I'm going to portray a Jewish girl who has an affair with a German officer and falls in love with him — I think that would have been a tough sell." But to assemble a film of Black Book's scale — small by Hollywood standards but enormous by European ones — without the backing of an American studio was no mean feat. The film went into production in 2005 with an elaborate co-production deal that Verhoeven describes as "a financial mosaic that at every moment seems about to fall apart." But Black Book held together and has already been a massive hit in Holland.
That doesn't mean, though, that Verhoeven, who continues to reside in Los Angeles, has turned his back on America. "I never changed location," he says with a smile. "I just took a sabbatical." His next movie, The Winter Queen, which he hopes to shoot this summer, will be filmed in English, though the financing was again assembled independently. Perhaps by then, Hollywood will have picked up on the fact that Paul Verhoeven is anything but a one-trick pony. "At least," he reasons, "it's good for them to know I can also work for $20 million and direct actors."
