Dutch-born director Paul Verhoeven’s Hollywood output bears the distinction of being some of the most totally awesome terrible movies ever produced. Showgirls, Basic Instinct RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers–none of these are what you might call “good” movies, or even “not completely awful” movies, but they’re also all modern classics; bad movies everyone’s seen and a lot of people can watch over and over again (I’m almost ashamed to admit how many times I’ve seen Total Recall in the last 17 years).
Before moving to the states to make some of Hollywood’s best bad movies, Verhoeven turned out more respectable genre fare in his home country, like 1980’s Spetters and ’83’s The Fourth Man (Which the Wexner Center screened a few years back), plus Dutch World War II film Soldier in Orange.
Last year’s Zwartboek (Black Book) found the director back in the Netherlands, working with his long-time Dutch collaborator Gerard Soeteman on another WWII film focusing on the Dutch Resistance, one which applies all the lessons of the Hollywood action flicks and thriller he’s picked up (and mastered) over the years to the subject matter he first explored in Soldier in Orange.
The results, finally making their way to the states this year and (to Columbus this weekend), are a prestige pic that plays like a blockbuster, a complex WWII epic set on an unusual front (Yeah, you’ve seen a few thousand WWII and/or Holocaust movies, but how have you seen about the Dutch Resistance?). Think The Good German, if Soderbergh played it straight instead of impishly riffing on The Third Man and Casablanca.
Carice van Houten plays Rachel Stein, a Dutch Jew living in hiding near the end of the war, who, through a series of tragedies, finds herself working with the resistance (a ragtag group of Jews, Christians, nationalists, Socialists and communists) to undermine the Nazi occupation. The former singer dyes her hair, changes her name and, during one early mission, stumbles into the presence of a stamp-collecting Gestapo chief (Sebastian Koch) whom she hits off with well enough that a new plan is hatched. Rachel will seduce him, and worm her way into the lion’s den.
She’s hardly the only double agent in the story, or the only character who’s not what she seems, and there are so many double and triple crosses that it can be somewhat dizzying, but Verhoeven makes each of them intensely thrilling. Dubbed a Jew to be persecuted by the Nazis, and a Nazi whore to be punished by the Dutch, Rachel takes a ton of abuse, probably more than any cinematic heroine since Lars von Trier beat up on Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, but she’s not portrayed as a victim or suffering saint. Rather, she’s a cunning and complex heroine, and Verhoeven and Soeteman make almost all of their characters cunning and complex (Even Waldemar Kobus as the stereotypically Satanically Evil Nazi, who turns out to be a quite a pianist and entertainer, when he’s not machine-gunning Jews and looting their corpses).
Powerfully acted and well constructed, it may be Verhoeven’s very best work–a genuinely good film that is every bit as enormously entertaining as his bad movies.