Synopsis
To fight the enemy, she must become one of them.
In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II, a Jewish singer infiltrates the regional Gestapo headquarters for the Dutch resistance.
2006 ‘Zwartboek’ Directed by Paul Verhoeven
In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II, a Jewish singer infiltrates the regional Gestapo headquarters for the Dutch resistance.
Carice van Houten Sebastian Koch Thom Hoffman Halina Reijn Waldemar Kobus Matthias Schoenaerts Theo Maassen Derek de Lint Christian Berkel Dolf de Vries Peter Blok Michiel Huisman Ronald Armbrust Frank Lammers Johnny de Mol Xander Straat Diana Dobbelman Timothy Deenihan Nolan Hemmings Skip Goeree Bert Luppes Marisa van Eyle Garrick Hagon Ronald de Bruin Menno van Beekum Marcel Musters Gijs Naber Pieter Tiddens Hugo Metsers Show All…
Michiel Collenteur Marc van der Bijl Germain Meser Marije Hondelink Kenzo Overbeeke Melina Karpovich
Jens Meurer Jeroen Beker Jos van der Linden Frans van Gestel San Fu Maltha Nadia Khamlichi Adrian Politowski Teun Hilte
James Boyle Eddy Joseph James Harrison Stuart Morton Herman Pieëte Michael Fentum Mark Taylor Melissa Lake Nigel Bennett Paul Govey Paul Hanks Alex Joseph Mike Dowson Phillip Barrett Georges Bossaers
Studio Babelsberg Motel Films Motion Investment Group Egoli Tossell Film Nederlands Fonds voor de Film uFilm Fu Works Hector BV Media Programme of the European Community Euroimages Fund of the Council of Europe VIP 4 Medienfonds ContentFilm International Clockwork Pictures CoBo Fonds FFA Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg Sony Pictures Classics
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On its surface a very classically made wartime epic/thriller with exciting espionage twists and action setpieces but of course taken to all the thorny and filthy and perverse extremes you'd expect from Verhoeven; complete with sex, shit and brain matter. Totally lost it when Carice Van Houten asks her Nazi lover whether he thinks her titties are Jewish, and later when she strips for him and he appears on-screen to be growing a boner beneath the sheets only for it to be revealed to be a gun. Only Paul would make time for moments like these in an otherwise fairly Hollywood piece of resistance pulp.
I almost forgot how fucking good this was. Almost. BLACK BOOK is a rowdy genre picture about the most grim of subject matters: WWII. Director Paul Verhoeven is a madman, embracing everything about movie movies, all the while skewering them within an inch of their life. He is both deadly serious and an absolute prankster. It's all here: candid sexuality, graphic violence, revenge, and betrayal. Who's good? Who's bad? If only it were that easy to figure out. The savagery of humankind is unbound by time and space. A war that can never be won.
Black Book is an unabashedly pulpy and entertaining espionage thriller about the Dutch resistance during WWII with a mix of genre play and tropes resurrected with fresh takes & twists without losing sight of the larger message. At times the plot seems outrageous and far-fetched, but it is based on true events. It's also a very erotic & perverse flick (it's what you expect from Paul Verhoeven), even considering the subject matter, which really helps you understand the main character and Carice van Houten is great in it.
Paul Verhoeven grew up during the Second World War in The Hague, which was bombed on 3 March 1945. "I will not be able to release myself from the war," Verhoeven said in 2008 to Elsevier Magazine about the influence of the war on his later life and films, in which violence regularly predominates. "As a child I saw the bombing, dead people lying on the street. These are penetrating memories. That determines your world view. It is therefore no coincidence that I can move easily in violence, in tensions, in ambushes. I know what it means to be on the run. Sometimes I dream that I am walking on roofs, on the run. It draws you more than you…
Hopelessness merely persists, but survival is neverending. Either way they cost a lot.
Welcome to another entry in the "let's get Lou to watch a movie from his home country" series. Tonight we're watching Paul Verhoeven's Black Book.
Somehow, I always thought this movie was one of those very specific WWII dramas we Dutch seem to have patented. While those are often quite solid, they're not something I enjoy putting on. With that in mind, I wasn't really looking forward to this movie. It took some persuading from @glimmerman96 (übrigens, vielen dank dafür) for me to finally give this a shot.
And I'm glad I did, because this wasn't at all what I was expecting (and I mean that in the best possible way.) Black Book has all the action, intrigue, nudity and…
Something of a career Rosetta Stone, in that it tackles the same triad of sleaze, fascism, and loot as Verhoeven’s subverted male fantasies, but is also in line with his other films about female protagonists, being a parable of survival in a grotesque world. The manifesto is the same as in Elle: In order to preserve one’s dignity on this planet, one must let go of guilt and shame. Interestingly, this is one of the few Verhoeven movies to present us with moral supporting characters, represented by resistance members like the communist Kuipers and the principled attorney Smaal, who (unlike their more corruptible co-conspirators) are fighting for reasons other than war and country—which renders the final shot politically ambiguous.
A wartime thriller set in the Netherlands towards the end of World War 2. The film focuses on a Jewish woman who joins the resistance, before infiltrating the local Nazi headquarters. It's a film about justice - how life isn't fair and how people don't always get what they deserve. It's also about sex and violence. Because whatever else this film is, it's a Paul Verhoeven film! It is the work of a master of entertainment - the plot juggles so many different balls, but feels a path through it all in a way that is constantly captivating and exciting. It doesn't pull it's punches either - always finding room for a sex scene, a gunfight or someone getting covered…
"One day you're singing, the next you're silenced."
Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) and her family make an attempt to escape growing persecution and capture by the Nazis toward the end of WWII. They find themselves caught in a trap which, by luck, she survives. Her family doesn't. Rachel goes underground, assumes the identity Ellis de Vries, and begins assisting the resistance, who sends her under cover to seduce SS Officer Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch) in a bid to free some of their captures comrades. Lines blur and allegiances are tested as Rachel finds herself caught in the middle, struggling to survive.
Verhoeven crafts a taut thriller against the backdrop of the unravelling of German power at the end of the…
Paul Verhoeven once again proves he's the master of juxtaposing the primordial forces of sex and violence, and how they're not too dissimilar in their uses as tools for exploitation. Verhoeven, never one for pulling his punches tells a story of a Jewish woman joining the Dutch resistance during the late stage of WWII. After watching her family get betrayed she soon finds herself working for one of the men who orchestrated the event. She has to use her wits and sexuality to get close to a high ranking captain in order to feed information back to the resistance.
"Black Book" is a film about betrayal and loyalty, in fact it's one of the best espionage films I've seen in…
I hardly have the awareness of Middle Eastern politics to comment on the ending of this, but the ending to this film uses imagery that is, especially these days, a can of worms that I'm not going to open at the moment (if only because this is the first of nine films I need to write about before bed). Suffice it to say I would not be surprised if it were an intentional (and, umm, pretty controversial) critique, coming from Verhoeven. Or perhaps I'm just letting current narratives color my perceptions of his intentions.
I found myself wrapped up in this far more than I tend to get, drawn in by the two facets of WWII narratives that I find…
Paul Verhoeven may well be in semi-retirement, but he left us with some real gems before his self imposed hiatus. Black Book for me is his finest achievement in film. A WWII resistance story, this was truly epic in every sense. The most expensive and commercially successful Dutch film of its time, it deserves its place among the very best European movies about WWII.
Focusing on Holland during the German occupation towards the end of 1944, we see a young Jewish woman hiding out from the Nazis. Forced to relocate after the destruction of her farmhouse hiding place, she seeks a route out of the country to safety with horrific consequences. The sole survivor of a massacre of fleeing Jews…