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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
The new Paul Verhoeven film, "Black Book," is set almost entirely in Holland during the later stages of the Second World War. It charts the efforts of a young Jewish woman named Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) to survive and prosper. She hides out with a farmer's family, then teams up with her own relatives and tries to flee the country on a barge. They are betrayed and slaughtered; Rachel alone escapes, and joins the Dutch Resistance. Here she is allotted the task of seducing Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), the courteous, stamp-collecting head of the local Gestapo. How, one might ask, did he rise to his present position? Did he torture his suspects with a pair of philatelist's tweezers?
From here, the film is entwined in double crosses, strokes of luck, and panicky exchanges of gunfire. Somebody within the Resistance is in league with the Germans; for more than two hours, Verhoeven keeps us on what he believes to be tenterhooks before revealing the villain. By this stage, the war is over, with Allied troops being feted in the streets and the unfortunate Rachel accused of collaboration. Her fate should hang in the balance, but, since the opening scene of the film shows her teaching in a kibbutz in 1956, the scales are decisively tipped.
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