When the farmhouse is accidentally destroyed by a low-flying Allied bomber, she is forced to flee or risk capture by the German forces who arrive in response to the resulting fire. Rachel's wartime story begins in 1944 in her native Netherlands, where she is being hidden from the Nazi occupation by a Christian family in the attic of their farmhouse. But a chance encounter sparks the recollections that constitute the bulk of the story. When we first meet Rachel, she seems to have achieved a happy stability in her life. But it is here that a chance encounter with wartime acquaintance who happens to visit the kibbutz on a Holy Land tour sparks the recollections that constitute the bulk of the story. When we-the-audience first meet Rachel-at an Israeli kibbutz in 1956-she seems to have achieved a happy stability in her life as a grade school teacher. Although the film does not revolve around a single, overarching action or mission on the part of its main character and is more of a tale than a story (see, " The Difference Between a Story and a Tale"), most of Rachel's efforts may be said to stem from a single type of intent-that of keeping.
BLACK BOOK 2006 FREE
Best not judge by covers.Black Book (Dutch title: Zwartboek) chronicles the journey of a young Dutch Jewish singer named Rachel as she struggles to remain free from capture and to help other Jews to survive in the dangerous environment of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the waning months of World War II. A noble visage or political assumption might distort as much as a small black book reveals. Van Houten’s barnstorming performance, accentuated by a bold, saturated palette, makes comparisons to Garbo and Jean Harlow plausible, but Rachel is far from the only character well-versed in the uses of glamour. Rachel is more sympathetic, but just as canny, and she takes to her role-playing life with aplomb. Like ‘Katie Tippel’ (1975) and ‘Showgirls’, ‘Black Book’ charts the progress of a woman set on survival and independence and willing to use sex. Such reversals divorce the global from the personal and focus attention on Rachel’s bizarrely ambivalent position as the Jew singing at the Nazi soirée. That film’s Hague liberation sequence was blithely jubilant its counterpart here is a nightmare ordeal, in keeping with the plot’s other reversals of historical expectation. As the Nazis crumble and Rachel begins to glean the contents of the titular logbook, however, she realises she may have less to fear from the disarmingly decent Müntze than the ‘heroes’ of the underground or a vengeful public.įor Verhoeven, the ostensibly heroic and dutiful are rarely distinguishable from the venal and inane even ‘Soldier of Orange’ (1977), adapted from the memoirs of one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated WW2 fighter pilots, presented the war more as gratifying adventure than noble struggle. Her family lost, the former singer falls in with a Resistance cell, is given a new identity and infiltrates the local SS HQ via a liaison with senior officer Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch). His first Dutch production in two decades uses Rachel’s experiences to hold a glass to the little-examined period of Dutch history around the end of WW2. In short, his pictures thrive on irony, and the superb, gripping ‘Black Book’ is a double-faced affair. Uniquely, Verhoeven makes populist films that challenge audiences to keep their distance – to acknowledge that the character with the most lines might not be a nice person, that plot can be a conspiracy against reason, that violent or sexual behaviour can be both more and less consequential than Hollywood convention insists. Following his move to America, his use of sex and violence in the likes of ‘Robocop’, ‘Basic Instinct’ and ‘Showgirls’ prompted further consternation, now compounded by his willingness to play as fast and loose with expectations of genre as he always had with character and narrative ‘Starship Troopers’, for instance, was accused of promoting the very fascistic tendencies it satirised. As the Netherlands’ most successful filmmaker of the ’70s and ’80s, he alienated critics and funders with his frank treatment of aggression, libido and ethical equivocacy. Vigorous stirring is Paul Verhoeven’s stock-in-trade.
Rachel drizzles a crucifix of jam into her porridge, smiles ingratiatingly, and vigorously stirs. ‘If the Jews had listened to Jesus,’ grumbles the father of the Dutch family sheltering her, ‘they wouldn’t be in such a mess now.’ It is September, 1944.
In our earliest glimpse of Rachel (Carice van Houten), the Jewish heroine of ‘Black Book’, she is being called for breakfast.
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