Black Book
Depart it to paul verhoeven to puncture popular right-versus-evil sanctimonies at some point of wartime, and to do it in as vulgar and trashy a manner as feasible. No longer that his 2006 epic black e book is any other showgirls. This movie—his first dutch production seeing that 1983’s the fourth guy—is “stylish” in comparison to a great deal of his u. S. Work: a sweeping, handsomely established length journey yarn full of violent shoot-outs, sexy seductions and last-minute betrayals. With its irreverent tone and populist idiom, this would have match quite properly in mainstream u. S. Multiplexes. Underneath its unabashedly crowd-captivating surface, however, is a dark imaginative and prescient of the moral complexities world struggle ii brought out on each facets.
Here, not all of the nazis are only evil; one in all them—ludwig müntze (sebastian koch)—is, in fact, black ebook’s romantic lead, a kind-hearted nazi with whom vengeful dutch resistance undercover agent rachel stein (carice van houten) falls in love. And some of rachel’s fellow resistance opponents are anti-semitic themselves. There’s a keening moral intelligence in black e-book that makes it as troubling as it is mightily unique. In other words, it’s paul verhoeven at his provocative quality.