Black Book (2006)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Israel, 1956: Jewish teacher Rachel Stein rather unexpectedly meets an old friend at the kibbutz. It brings back memories of her experiences in the Netherlands during the war, memories of betrayal. In September 1944, Rachel's hiding place is bombed by Allied troops; she makes contact with a resistance member and joins a group of Jews to be smuggled across the Biesbosch to the freed South Netherlands. Only Rachel escapes a massacre by patrol Germans, and is rescued by a resistance group under the leadership of Gerben Kuipers, whose son is captured trying to smuggle weapons. Kuipers asks Rachel to seduce SS-hauptsturmführer Ludwig Müntze, a mission that she will soon learn that the boat attack wasn't a coincidence.
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What critics compared Black Book to
Before Paul Verhoeven became an infamous Hollywood provocateur of the '80s and '90s with lurid, slippery spectacles like "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls" -- and before he became the apparently washed-up former provocateur of the 2000s -- he was just a Dutch film director.
As someone who undervalued the political smarts of Basic Instinct and Showgirls when they first appeared, I'm probably not the best one to fault others for not taking Verhoeven seriously, but I still have to say that, ethically speaking, Black Book seems far less vulgar than a feel-good Holocaust movie like Schindler's List.
While fans snubbed his sexy romp Showgirls, Verhoeven has shown influential filmmaking vision in such films as Basic Instinct, Total Recall and Robocop.
After gaining prominence in Europe with Turkish Delight (1973), Soldier of Orange (1977), Spetters (1980) and The Fourth Man (1983), Mr. Verhoeven burst upon the American scene with big-budget blockbuster projects like Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Basic Instinct (1992), all of which did better at the box-office than with critics.
Controversial Dutch director Paul Verhoeven brought excessive sex and violence into Hollywood with enjoyable high concept films such as RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers.
Shades of similar catnip in Basic Instinct, one of the many Hollywood rousers director Verhoeven turned out after decamping his native Holland for the U.S. some 20 years ago.
Watching Inglourious Basterds, I was reminded of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and Bryan Singer's Valkyrie , both of which contain themes and ideas that are echoed here.
And this time, it is another Hitchcock movie that comes to mind—“Notorious.”
Reijn has frequently mentioned being inspired by the films of Paul Verhoeven (Reijn worked with him as an actress in "Black Book"), but "Babygirl" isn't trying to be Verhoeven — it's much more subtle and cerebral than that, but very clearly crafted by someone who appreciates his brand of in-your-face horniness.
Having worked with her fellow countryman Paul Verhoeven in 2006's Black Book, Reijn's approach to the messiness of sexual passion recalls his early classic Turkish Delight (1973).
The Dutch actress turned director, who starred in Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 “Black Book,” takes a page off her mentor’s rulebook to pay homage to the classic erotic thriller with a story about an intense relationship between a powerful executive and their younger employee.
Its writer and director is Halina Reijn, who in her parallel career as an actress co-starred in Black Book, the 2006 wartime thriller from Elle and Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven. Babygirl is her third feature as a director, and is a provocation in the classic Verhoeven mould. Some films don’t let their audience off the hook.
All feel relevant since (in order): Isabelle Huppert is this year's jury president and starred in Michael Haneke's erotic psychological drama; she also starred in the 2016 psycho-sexual thriller by Paul Verhoeven, a director who Reijn acted for in Black Book in 2006; and Kidman was on the Lido 25 years ago with the late director's final – and controversial – film.
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Elle — which is directed by returnee from Hollywood Paul Verhoeven (of Total Recall, Showgirls and, more recently, Black Book) — is essentially a startlingly enjoyable character study with an extraordinarily difficult starting point.
Top directors from Spielberg (“Saving Private Ryan”) to Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”) to Eastwood (“Letters from Iwo Jima”) to Verhoeven (“Black Book”) have all taken on the second World War and used it to hold up a mirror to their personal styles.
A Verhoeven version of Hacksaw Ridge, we can be sure, would underline the contradictions in Desmond's stance as bluntly and disturbingly as possible: just consider what becomes of the Christian pacifist character in his World War II thriller Black Book.
Paul Verhoeven originally adapted the book with his longtime collaborator Gerard Soeteman ( Black Book , Turkish Delight ), but the screenwriter stepped down when it became too “sexualized.”
Nothing here tops the fabulous amount of feces that Verhoeven dumped on Carice van Houten in 2006′s Black Book – the director’s first post-Hollywood outing – but there is no doubt that Benedetta fulfills the barf-bag whims of the forever uninhibited, filthily uncontrollable filmmaker.
Opening with (what else?) bird shit in the face of a one eyed soldier, Verhoeven doesn’t quite get Black Book (2006) in the fecal arena, but his insistence on depicting the realistic parameters of bodily functions and fluids abounds.
His best film is “Black Book,” about a singer who engaged with the Gestapo for the Dutch Resistance in Nazi occupied Holland.
If anything, this is a bit paradoxical given how traditionalist most of the film’s other formal elements are: visually, this is Verhoeven at his blandest and most conservative, operating in a purposely stodgy Euro-arthouse mode similar to Black Book and Elle, and one that does this already dry content no favors beyond making the supposed point even more overt.
Desde la sátira social de un blockbuster como “Robocop”, hasta producciones más “artísticas” como “Elle” o “Black Book”, el afamado director siempre ha tenido algo que decir sobre una gran variedad de temas, y lo ha hecho de manera explotadora, exagerada y, muchas veces, sin tomarse demasiado en serio a sí mismo.
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The man who brought you Robocop, Starship Troopers, Black Book, and (shudder) Showgirls has a knack for latching onto a popular lurid genre, doubling down the perversion, upping the insanity, and then topping it all off with liberal doses of satirical humour to giggle about the fact that anyone ever takes this sort of thing seriously.
Elle — which is directed by returnee from Hollywood Paul Verhoeven (of Total Recall, Showgirls and, more recently, Black Book) — is essentially a startlingly enjoyable character study with an extraordinarily difficult starting point.
The director of such instant classics as “ Starship Troopers ” and “ Black Book ” uses Philippe Djian ’s novel “Oh…” as a launching pad for an erotic suspense thriller packed with thematic material regarding the thin line between sociopathic and psychopathic behavior.
This is, after all, the same man who dared to present a love story between a Jewish singer-spy and a sympathetic Nazi colonel in his 2006 World War II thriller Black Book.
That filmmaker all but vanished during the director’s stay in Hollywood, only to resurface with the pulpy and absorbing Nazi resistance drama Black Book.
Verhoeven made it in 2006, and it’s called “Black Book,” about a Jewish resistance fighter (Carice van Houten) in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the Second World War who doesn’t merely seduce a Gestapo official (Sebastian Koch) in order to infiltrate his office; she falls in love with him.