Black Book/Zwartboek (Paul Verhoeven, 2006)

[Antoine Doinel]

SPC books rights to WWII drama 'Black'

NEW YORK -- Sony Pictures Classics has paid in the high six figures for North American rights to Paul Verhoeven's perverse World War II drama "Black Book (Zwartboek)." The film was roundly ridiculed among distributors at the Toronto International Film Festival as "'Schindler's List' meets 'Showgirls'" (the latter film, another type of camp drama, was notoriously directed by Verhoeven). Scenes often cited include the Jewish female lead character graphically dyeing her pubic hair blonde to infiltrate the Nazi party as a member of the resistance, captors dumping a vat of dung on her and several ribald sexual encounters. The bad word-of-mouth was turned around a bit by some positive reviews and the Netherlands selection of the film as its official foreign language entry for this year's Academy Awards. Some attributed this decision to the film being the first project Verhoeven has directed in his native country in 23 years. His last feature was 2000's "Hollow Man."

[stephan73]

I'm from the Netherlands and I also think that Verhoeven's film was picked as the entry for the oscars because it's his first Dutch film since 1984.
I'd personally would've loved to see either Langer Licht or Guernsey as the movies picked to enter the oscars..

[Barmy]

"'Schindler's List' meets 'Showgirls'"? I am totally there.

From the Guardian's Toronto wrap-up (I can't remember if that is the commie anti-semitic UK rag):

...the adoring reviews went to Paul Verhoeven, whose Black Book is both a ripping adventure tale and a revision of Second World War Resistance myths. Verhoeven is said to have been working on the script, the unlikely adventures of a German-Jewish woman (Carice van Houten) in occupied Holland, for more than 20 years. Who'd have imagined that the director of Showgirls would emerge as the saviour of the festival? Well, he does know something about high heels.

[Galen Young]

The Dutch website and a better quality trailer. Looks hot! Looking forward to it.

[Antoine Doinel]

'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

Friday January 12, 2007
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?"

· Black Book is released next Friday. The film will be previewed, as part of a fortnight retrospective of Verhoeven's work, on Sunday at the ICA, London. Tickets and details: 020-7930 3647

[DrewReiber]

I hate to recommend such a terrible rag, but the current issue of Empire Magazine has a decent interview with Verhoeven. I'm really looking forward to Black Book!

[a.khan]

I hate to recommend such a terrible rag, but the current issue of Empire Magazine has a decent interview with Verhoeven. I'm really looking forward to Black Book!

Yes, I was tipped off about the Verhoeven interview in Empire by a chum. He insisted that this piece more than compensates for the embarrassment of having this rag under your arm. If I'm not mistaken the interview also has Verhoeven speaking about his Jesus project.

[Nothing]

The Guardian anti-semitic commies? Erm... Try middlebrow centre-left PC liberal hand-wringers (as Jeffries firmly demonstrates in that interview, eg. "the film's aesthetic and ethical choices might make some queasy. " etc). Sigh. You'd have hoped most people would have realised by now that Showgirls is a far better film than Shindler's List...

[fred]

The Guardian anti-semitic commies? Erm... Try middlebrow centre-left PC liberal hand-wringers (as Jeffries firmly demonstrates in that interview, eg. "the film's aesthetic and ethical choices might make some queasy. " etc). Sigh. You'd have hoped most people would have realised by now that Showgirls is a far better film than Shindler's List...

Amen. On both counts.

[Barmy]

This is a good, not great, film. The lead actress in particular did not carry the film sufficiently. I liked the idea of making some of the Nazis good guys and some of the Resistance bad guys. The film would have worked better at about 3 hours. At 2-1/4 hours it feels a bit cramped, particularly toward the end.

[Highway 61]

I saw this last night after it finally opened in my neck of the woods. Of all the recent films about WWII--Pan's Labyrinth, Eastwood's Iwo Jima films, hell, even Army of Shadows--I think Black Book overshadows them all. Yes, Verhoeven packs the film with sex, but because so much of the film is about trust, doubt, and betrayal, sex seems to me a perfectly appropriate motif.

The genius of the film is its moral ambiguity. Hardly original, I realize. However, I can't remember another war film that questioned not just the morality of soldiers, but non-combatants as well. Verhoeven repeatedly unnerves us with scenes of peaceful people choosing war without even realizing it. Quite timely, of course.

Altogether, I'd say Black Book is an excellent film that was sadly overlooked during last year's award season and is now being dumped with little fanfare. A shame. Check it out if you can.

[ranaing83]

Caught this last night and loved it. One of the most purely entertaining, engrossing films I have seen in quite a while though I thought it lacked a certain depth. Verhoeven creates such an interesting stable of characters and moral dilemma's it's a shame that they weren't explored more fully.

On the other hand, the film is so intelligently constructed and conceived that I am willing to forgive Verhoeven's "decision" to forgo a more thorough examination of his characters.

[exte]

I saw this tonight, and although I did fall asleep at certain moments, I liked the film. It's not your basic, barebones three act film. It goes on and on, but it a good way. There's some gore and a lot of nudity, but not in a tasteless way, just in a way you don't really see in R rated films that often. I wouldn't say this is the perfect movie, or a masterpiece, the but it's enjoyable, engrossing storytelling. Sometimes it felt a little too 'glossy' I guess would be the right word, but it's not enough to stop the movie. Anyway, it's good to see the Nazi/WWII/Jewish-plight film be stretched in different ways a bit...

[manicsounds]

I borrowed the Japanese DVD, and I noticed optical censoring. I'm guessing that the theatrical versions or other region DVDs don't have this? As no one has cited it.

[Cold Bishop]

I borrowed the Japanese DVD, and I noticed optical censoring. I'm guessing that the theatrical versions or other region DVDs don't have this?

Yes, Carice van Houten pubic hairs are there in other editions, if that's what you're asking.

[Belmondo]

I borrowed the Japanese DVD, and I noticed optical censoring. I'm guessing that the theatrical versions or other region DVDs don't have this?

Yes, Carice van Houten pubic hairs are there in other editions, if that's what you're asking.

Assuming we are all talking about the same scene ... on the commentary track, Verhoeven says we are looking at a close up of a brown brush, not Carice.

[kieslowski_67]

Loved this. It was one of my favorite films of 2006. The lead actress was great.

[manicsounds]

Actually, no, that scene was intact.

I was refering to the schlong.

[hearthesilence]

Finally caught up with this, and it lived up to the hype. I've remained a skeptic even as his work has been heavily re-evaluated over the past decade, but this is a masterpiece. Maybe his approach worked best in this context (or with this material), but everything seemed to work together (instead of at odds with each other) brilliantly.

Also, I'm not a fan of Game of Thrones and I have a limited familiarity with the cast, but I'm very amused that the lead actress is now something of a household name thanks to that show - apparently she had a tough time breaking into international stardom following this film, it took Game of Thrones to do it. Glad it happened, she's wonderful in this film.