Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has divided his career between stints in Hollywood and Europe. In his earlier years he made smaller, character-driven projects for European audiences, such as Turkish Delight (1973), Soldier of Orange (1977), and Spetters (1980). He then moved to the US to direct often futuristic big-budget films such as Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997), and his most notorious films, the psychosexual drama Basic Instinct (1992), and Showgirls (1995). After a 20-year absence from the European film scene, Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands to film another character-driven project, Black Book (2006), which he cowrote with longtime associate Gerard Soeteman. (The film, most of which is in Dutch, was released in Europe as Zwartboek.)

Black Book tells the story of Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a young Jewish woman in occupied Holland in the latter part of World War II. A former Berlin cabaret singer, Rachel has returned to her native Holland, where she is hiding out in the countryside with a Christian family. When her hiding place is accidentally blown up by an Allied bomber, Rachel decides to run to Allied-occupied territory and safety. Obtaining money and jewels from her family’s lawyer, Notary Smaal (Dolf de Vries), she meets up with the rest of her family, who have also been in hiding, and boards a river barge with many other Jews seeking escape. The barge is ambushed by a German patrol boat and all are killed save Rachel, who dives overboard and hides along the river bank. She meets up with Dutch resistance fighters and readily joins them, adopting a new cover as singer Ellis de Vries. On one mission, she meets Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch), a high-ranking officer in the SD -- the intelligence division of the SS -- and agrees to sleep with him to gain access to information that could save the lives of captured resistance fighters. Müntze turns out to possess a decency not expected of an SD officer, and Rachel finds herself falling in love with him. But it becomes evident that the Nazis have planted an informer among the resistance fighters, and Rachel’s cover is in peril.

What makes Black Book special is that Verhoeven and Soeteman have refrained from creating stereotypical characters. The Nazis are not always purely evil, and the resistance fighters are not all purely good and heroic. In fact, other than Rachel herself, the most likable character is Müntze. In his portrayal of Müntze, Koch is reminiscent of Gregory Peck in his reserve and decency -- one has to remind oneself that Müntze uses information gained through the intimidation, beating, and torture of civilians that takes place just a few floors below his office. Although it’s clear that Müntze supports such brutal interrogation methods -- they are, after all, carried out by his own subordinates -- that does not prevent us from empathizing with him and hoping he will safely survive the war.

Rachel’s best friend at SD HQ is Ronnie (Halina Reijn), a Dutch girl who has become the girlfriend of Günther Franken (Waldemar Kobus), a thoroughly evil SD officer who has murdered hundreds of Jews and who enthusiastically supervises the torture of the captured resistance fighters. When Ronnie conspires to rescue Rachel after the singer has been exposed and imprisoned, we realize that, in war, people do what they must to survive; good people do not always do good things, but heroes are sometimes found in unlikely places.

My only disappointment with Soeteman and Verhoeven’s story is that, in the exposure of the collaborator, that character’s personality changes so dramatically that I no longer believed what I was seeing. It is here that the film lost its plausibility. And by wrapping up its narrative so neatly, Black Book feels like a Hollywood movie in which all questions are answered to the audience’s satisfaction. It would have been better to sustain the mystery by not revealing all.

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