Bedding That Nice Nazi, and Other Wartime Perils
The plot -
Paul Verhoeven’s supremely vulgar romp “Black Book” takes off in September 1944. A young Jewish woman, the unsinkable Rachel Stein — played with ferocious energy by the Dutch actress Carice van Houten — has been squirreling herself away with a Christian farm family when an American bomber blows their house to smithereens.
Not one to let an Allied payload cramp her style, Rachel picks herself up, dusts herself off and flings herself into the open arms of a passing swain, the first in a series of dashing rescuers who will accompany her through tangles of intrigue and steamy romances in a Holocaust story like few others.
...a Jewish woman’s body is saved from the off-camera death camps, gas chambers and ovens to become a site of negotiation, a means of survival and an erotic spectacle. Abused and misused, stripped and stripped again, Rachel — named, it’s worth noting, for the mother of Israel — survives by masking that body with a putatively Aryan disguise. She also falls for a Nazi.
...After dyeing her hair a brassy blond, Rachel insinuates herself into the superdashing Nazi’s confidences and, soon enough, his bedroom. It takes just one glance at the top of her head with its creeping dark roots for Müntze to guess the truth. Grasping her naked breasts in her hands, Rachel pleads her case with Shakespearean gravitas, “Hath not a Jew, er, eyes?”
Yowza! In truth, Rachel — now called Ellis — asks of her breasts and then her hips, “Are these Jewish?” Seduced by the pertness of her argument or perhaps that of her physicality, attractively framed by black garters and stockings, Müntze answers her question silently but firmly. Taken in by his sensitivity and, no doubt, his decision to spare her life — during one pillow talk, this nice Nazi shares how his wife and children died in an Allied bombing — Rachel finds herself forced to navigate an increasingly ticklish line between duty and desire.
...Black Book” works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to “true events” notwithstanding. It also helps if you don’t worry about its loosey-goosey moral relativism, which, among other things, involves one character’s stating that at least some of the Dutch are no better than the Nazis...
...it’s too bad that Mr. Verhoeven doesn’t spend more time on the film’s most provocative image, which shows a Holocaust survivor tucked behind a barbed-wire fence on an Israeli kibbutz in 1956 and indicates that Jewish survival remains a never-ending story.
It's that last sentence that bothers me. On the one hand, I could say that the reviewer is expressing sympathy for Jews - persecuted in Europe, persecuted in the Middle East.
On the other hand, he could be saying that Israel is now where "6 million" Jews could be the next Holocaust victims and it is Zionism's fault that it collected so many Jews in one place just waiting for the next Hitler (and I know one over in Iran).
I hope it is somewhere in-between.
R-rated trailer.
More info for those not planning on viewing the movie.
Another opinion:
The trouble with “Black Book” is that, in urging us to admire the resourcefulness of a character—a Jewish woman pretending to serve the Nazis—it hopes to cover up its own deceit. This is trash pretending to serve the cause of history: a “Dirty Dozen” knockoff with one eye on “Schindler’s List.” Everything about it, from the earnest strivings of the musical score to the beery gropings of the Germans, has the whiff of soap opera. At one point, the sanitization is literal: Rachel, arrested as a traitor, is stripped to the waist and drenched in human excrement. There may be grounds for showing such maltreatment, but there are none for what happens next—a shot of our heroine, scrubbed and untraumatized, leaving the scene with her rescuer, a Resistance friend, and walking out into the sunshine. Is that how Verhoeven thinks that individuals, let alone countries, emerge from humiliation? Far from turning serious, the director of “Basic Instinct” has proved that, when it comes to grappling with good and evil, his instincts aren’t basic enough.
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Late Addition
"I never thought I'd dread liberation," she says. That's the movie's melancholy moral. Repeatedly buried and resurrected, Rachel is a miraculous survivor. But as the final shot makes clear, resettlement in Israel hardly marks the end of her travail. Like the hero of RoboCop and Verhoeven's planned Jesus movie, she's another one of his non-Christian Christs.
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