Ray Pride

(Zwartboek) Paul Verhoeven toyed with the elements of "Black Book" for thirty years, he says, eventually working it out with his customary co-writer on Dutch projects Gerard Soeteman, and you can tell the thought that's gone into it: details chime, plot elements resonate, behavior orchestrates architecturally, in classic American studio style. But its story of Rachel, a Dutch Jewish woman who, at the end of World War II, collaborates with Nazi occupiers after witnessing the slaughter of her family, is Verhoeven at his Euro-trashiest, a kind of riotous, ribald update of Fassbinder's "Marriage of Maria Braun." (Oft-naked lead Carice van Houten even bears a hint of "Maria Braun"-era Hanna Schygulla.) This is the director of "Robocop," "Starship Troopers" and "Showgirls," after all, and his energy remains high in this fierce and manic and good and sometimes great movie, florid yet economical, hurtling along with a freight train of plot complications, reversals and colorful intrigues. The story is often purest trash told with utmost sincerity. There are tons of lyrical moments, mostly thrown away, such as a passing Jeep making a turn into a stand of poplars, straight out of a Jacob van Ruisdael painting. (Verhoeven does not neglect the sex, including the blondeing of Rachel's pubic hair; his boldest image may be one in a dank basement of a woman's pale feet in high-heeled strappy sandals scrunching across a bed of coal.) The dynamic turns include a reliance on large-object-in-foreground compositions to provide depth, and placing multiple cameras unusually close to each other in some scenes for an intriguingly fluttery cutting pattern. At the slightest turn, racism bites like an ethnic slur out of Don Imus' mouth: "Is the life of a Jew worth that of a good Dutchman?" The final shot is brief yet exquisite, with its own grammar, an unusual pan right against motion (most of Verhoeven's shots in "Black Book" move left and lower slightly on movement) and a quick fade as the image resounds, suggesting with breathtaking alacrity that after war, there is always war, and only war. 145m. 2.35 anamorphic widescreen.

"Black Book" opens Friday.

(2007-04-10)

Also by Ray Pride

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Tip of the Week
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Tip of the Week
Producer-director-editor Philip Gröning's "Into Great Silence," a humble 162-minute documentary about a silent order of monks in the French Alps' Grand Chartreuse monastery--shot without crew or lighting--is long, but, as you would expect, meditative
(2007-03-27)

The Mourning After
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Tip of the Week
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Tip of the Week
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Killer Looks
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