Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
A
Showgirl Goes to War
(Black Book, 5/28/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Paul
Verhoeven is one of the great conundrums of modern movies. At his best,
he's produced some of the better genre entertainments of his generation
(in science fiction, the smart Robocop, prescient Total Recall,
and tres so-campy-it's-cool Starship Troopers; in sex
thrillers, the brilliant The Fourth Man and infamous Basic
Instinct). Though Verhoeven's storytelling never lacks momentum,
the chilly Euro-ambiguity of his moral vision can sometimes stray into
the seedy. We have, unfortunately, seen more of this Mr. Hyde side lately
(Showgirls, Hollow Man), The rejuvenative effect of Verhoeven's
recent return to his native Holland may have something to do with the
latest twist in the Verhoeven canon, the fine WWII spy thriller Black
Book.
The story (co-written by Verhoeven
and Gerard Soeteman) concerns Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a former
cabaret singer on the run from the occupying Germans in 1944. The fictional
Rachel has nothing like the bookishness of Anne Frank—though she
survives by living behind a rack of jelly jars and witnesses the massacre
of her entire family, each misfortune only seems to draw her closer
to the epicenter of evil. Because of her good looks and singing talent,
she is drafted by the Dutch resistance to infiltrate SS headquarters,
posing as the elegant courtesan "Ellis de Vries". Rachel/Ellis
performs her double act with breezy aplomb—until she meets a dishy
German Hauptsturmführer (Sebastian Koch) who, troublingly,
turns out to be a decent, bookish sort after all. The ensuing conflict
makes a murky gray out of what is supposed to be the classic "just
war."
On the surface, Rachel/Ellis seems
an implausible creation. The modelesque Van Houten appears to belong
to that lost tribe of Israel led out of Egypt by Kirsten Dunst. More
to the point, that any young woman one step ahead of deportation to
a death camp would not only show her face in public, but flash her
thighs at a column of German stormtroopers, suggests more stupidity
than sass. Koch's stamp-collecting SS officer elicits sympathy just
by looking at her as any mere mortal would—with bafflement.
But if there is any consistent theme
in Verhoeven's career, it is the subversive—even redemptive—power
of sex. Van Houten may make an unlikely refugee, but no political tyranny
has ever really conquered the power of the come-hither gaze. In this
sense, the unsinkable Rachel/Ellis becomes a somewhat less narcissistic
version of Romy (Elizabeth Berkely), the sex kitten in Showgirls whose
ultimate triumph no qualm or humiliation can stop. As she sits open-legged
to dye her short hairs red, she's also the arch-manipulatrix "Catherine
Trammell" (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct—though again
with the difference that her lies have a somewhat more constructive
purpose.
The picaresque way Black Book
unfolds-a little song and dance, a little espionage, leavened with some
modern-feeling depravity—makes for a surprisingly entertaining
confection. Just as we begin to wonder if Verhoeven has found what the
neo-cons call "moral clarity," he and writer Soeteman jiggle
the ethical compass with a series of plot reversals that, in the end,
verge on the absurd. But like the endlessly game Van Houten, Black
Book is never dull.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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