Dutch Retreat

Paul Verhoeven returns to Holland to throw the Black Book at it.

by Sam Adams

Read Sam Adams' review of Black Book

"When I met Paul, I immediately comprehended his movies," says Sebastian Koch. "He is like that." It's a tough notion to swallow at first; when I meet Paul Verhoeven, he neither exposes himself nor shoots me in the head. Since he emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s, the Dutch director has been associated with ultraviolent, hypersexualized spectacles like Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers. But in the best of his American films, his pulsating libidinal energy works hand in hand with an equally ferocious intelligence. (Koch calls him "intelligent, but not intellectual.")

PAUL BEARER: Verhoeven (right) preps a shot with director of photography Karl Walter Lindenlaub. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Within 30 seconds of meeting Verhoeven, it's immediately apparent that the potent and sometimes uncontrolled life force that pulses through his films comes directly from him. Knowing that the failure of 2000's Hollow Man was catastrophic enough to put Verhoeven off the American film industry, I ask if returning to his native Holland for the first time in 20 years was "liberating." Ten minutes later, I have my answer, as well as the answer to a half-dozen questions I haven't had the chance to ask. Merely invoking the notion of liberation unleashes a torrent of verbiage from the wild-eyed director.

"It was liberating for me in that, first, I could do what I wanted. In the U.S., it was rare that I could put myself into the script. With the exception of Starship Troopers, where I worked a lot with the writer, mostly it was like projecting myself as much as I could in the movie, which basically succeeded most of the time. Although with Hollow Man, I didn't find myself very much there. After that, I felt I had to back a little bit more to myself. I wanted to look at something that was more completely, from the beginning, me. From the concept on."

That something is Black Book, which not only returns Verhoeven to Holland, but reunites him with his longtime collaborator Gerard Soeteman, who writes nearly all of Verhoeven's Dutch films, including The Fourth Man and Soldier of Orange. Set during the German occupation of Holland, the film stars Carice van Houten as a Dutch Jew who goes undercover as a loyal collaborator, infiltrating Nazi HQ and seducing Koch's German officer.

On the one hand, Black Book is the most conventional movie Verhoeven has made in years, a period thriller with plenty of sex, some violence, even a song or two. But it's also typically provocative, not least in its characterization of the Dutch people as largely acquiescent to the Nazis, at least before the German defeat at Stalingrad changed the war's momentum. "If you read the research that's been done in the last 10 or 15 years, the percentage of Dutch resistance fighters is minimalistic," Verhoeven says. "The majority of Dutch people were waiting to see which way the ball will roll."

The assertion of Dutch complicity might well have dampened Verhoeven's homecoming, but instead Black Book became the most successful R-rated film in Dutch history. (The previous record-holder was Verhoeven's Spetters.) The critics gave him a typically frosty reception, but audiences warmed to the movie — particularly, Verhoeven says, the younger generation, who he sees as less attached to rosy notions of the past.

It remains to be seen whether the movie will find favor in the U.S., where movies about World War II — and particularly movies that touch, even indirectly, on the Holocaust — are invariably sober affairs. Black Book has its grave moments, particularly a shocking coda that pulls the rug out from under a previously happy resolution, but they're mixed with sex, violence, even a few musical numbers — a brew that prompted the consistently wrong-headed Anthony Lane to dismiss the movie as "trash masquerading as history."

Of course, mixing pop and politics is a Verhoeven specialty, and he sees no reason to exempt the Holocaust. "You have to see it a little bit as sacred. And I think that's a mistake, because there are other holocausts and genocides. I feel strongly that the Holocaust is a historical event, like all the other elements of the movie are historical events. In the U.S., of course, the Holocaust is seen as a singularity in space-time, but I think that's a wrong perception."

Koch, who recently played Albert Speer in a German miniseries, admits, "It's a risk to work with Paul and not destroy everything I've done." But although he has concerns about how the movie will be received in Germany, he can't help but bow to Verhoeven's charisma. "If he's talking, he's directing; he has an energy that is so strong, he can take people with him. He can even do something to the audience, physically. I like that very much."

For her part, van Houten doesn't see what the fuss is about. "It's funny to see that there are people who say it's great fun, that it's an amusing film. But that, as well as the sexual parts, I don't know why that cannot be together," with the movie's more serious aspects. "Obviously, it was not that everyone kept their pants on during the war. For me, that's not so shocking."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)