I just got back from seeing the very-little-publicized Dutch film Black Book. I went to see it because of the review in The Onion here, which sums it up pretty well. But it’s even better than that. The lead performance (by Carice van Houten) is absolutely stunning, and it takes place in a really fascinating time period (right before the end of WWII, when everything is starting to fall apart for the Nazis, but they’re still, for the moment, in power).
I think I literally saw the last showing before it closed here… but hopefully some of you all can catch it while it’s still showing.
Yeah, it’s a great movie. I don’t think it out-masterpieces Showgirls, whose sheer hysterical emotional energy sets that film apart, but it’s basically the same story (along with *Keetje Tippel *and Flesh and Blood) of a young woman finding, in a cruel world, that she has no one but herself to depend on and she’d better learn fast what she needs to do to survive.
Only, I think it’s the most literal of the four, since (my theory here) this theme resonates with Verhoeven because of a childhood under Nazi occupation. Still, especially with the final sound effect, it’s a brilliant movie.
I agree that the film’s use of history is extremely interesting. One of the most provocative aspects, I think, is how the coming of peace, or rather more technically the end of the war, isn’t a complete solution for the problems of the time, and that in many ways, for many people, life during peace is actually worse than life during war. The final sound effect mentioned by lissener underlines, with wickedly funny subtlety, this theme.
Really, a great, great movie. One of Verhoeven’s more accessible, and not so sadistically manipulative, works.
I finally got to see the movie yesterday; we’re kind of behind the times in Tacoma . The movie is superb, with even minor characters given strong identities and repaying the director with excellent performances. They’re so good that you never doubt the characters no matter how wild the plot twists. The pacing of the movie is strong. Movies traditionally falter in the middle; this film’s best scenes are in the middle. The only flaw is that there’s too much plot packed in the last hour. You can both enjoy this film as a serious rumination on one’s reaction to times of evil or as a straight ahead action movie. I highly urge you to see it before it goes from the movie screens.
> Only, I think it’s the most literal of the four, since (my theory here) this theme
> resonates with Verhoeven because of a childhood under Nazi occupation.
World War II ended before Verhoeven’s seventh birthday, so his memory of the Nazi occupation probably isn’t very good.
I’m sure his parents remember plenty. IME there’s still a lot of low-level animosity in Western Europe to the Germans. It’ll take another generation or two to disappear.
I remember picking up my sister from the hospital 2 months after my third birthday. Verhoeven has said, in interviews, that his childhood memories of the Nazi occupation of Holland are extremely important in his work.
Did anyone catch the full plot? When it all comes out at the end it’s bit quick and beyond what is made obvious I didnt quite get precisely who was and wasn’t in on the betraying jews and stealing their stuff thing.
There’s a difference between expecting a seven yo’s memories to be accurate and reliable for the details of things around them, and accepting that what one experiences at that age is going to go a long way to setting the idea of what the norm for one’s life will be.
It’s a bit of an illusion, of course, since nothing stays the same, but I find it completely believable for Verhooven to have vivid memories of that time, and more a set of even more vivid memories as the world around him changed back to what everyone else was telling him was what normality should be. He’d have to have been super-human not to have something like that, at age seven, have a profound impact on his life and world-view.
I have one memory that I can be sure is from when I was three years old, but it’s very fragmentary. I have some other memories from when I was six years old or less but not a lot of them, and they don’t say much about the state of the world of the time. (Also, please notice, Verhoeven was six when World War II ended, not seven. Please don’t fudge the age.) By most standards, I have a pretty good memory, incidentally. I tend to surprise most people by my accurate memory of the details of incidents from the past. I think that most people’s memory of what happened to them when they were six years old is about things that happened to them personally, not about the state of the world, unless it was significant to their own lives. Is there any evidence that Verhoeven’s home was taken over by Nazis, or that his family was starving, or that there was any other way in which he or his family was personally affected by the war in a way noticeable to a six-year-old? Furthermore, the fact that his parents remembered the war well (and I’m sure that they did) has nothing to do with the statement that I made. I never said that after the war that he didn’t hear a lot about it from his parents and from other adults. Of course he did. I said his memory of the war isn’t very good. I said nothing about what effect hearing about the war in the years just afterwards had on him.
So . . . what are you trying to convince us of, then, by insisting that your personal experiences of memory are universal, rather than individual? That Verhoeven is lying?
Point being (sorry, missed my window of edit), that I know more than one person who has zero memory of their childhood; one person before she was ten, another before she was seven. I, who remember when I was three, have a better memory of my childhood than they do. So do you. So it follows that such things are extremely individual. And it further follows, therefore, that your own personal experience of memory couldn’t possibly be more irrelevant to Verhoeven’s–or anyone’s–own personal experience of memory. So if a person who spent his earliest years under a shadow that must surely have affected every aspect of the world he lived in, says that, as an artist, that memory has an effect on his art, I’m certainly going to take him at his word.
To speak up in support of lissener’s point: When I was five my family moved from a suburb of Toronto to a suburb of Boston. The culture shock was very real for me. I can point to some details that are vivid, but mostly it’s just the sense that I was in some land full of strange customs. (Not least of which being the ubiquity of the Boston (and other regional) accents.)
And this was in a completely peaceful transfer, and I’d been visiting my grandparents in NY and NJ with some regularity while we’d lived in Canada.
For Princhester, the only members of the Resistance involved in the robbery plot were the lawyer and the doctor (the one who injected Rachel with the insulin). The doctor told the Germans about the escape plot that happened on Hitler’s birthday both to save his own neck and abscond with all the money .
> So if a person who spent his earliest years under a shadow that must surely
> have affected every aspect of the world he lived in, says that, as an artist, that
> memory has an effect on his art, I’m certainly going to take him at his word.
Verhoeven didn’t say that his memories of World War II had an effect on his art. You said that. Do you have any citation that he ever said such a thing? What you’re doing is attributing an idea to Verhoeven (that he was significantly affected, in some way that he still remembers, by the events of World War II) that you have no idea if he actually believes, and then you’re claiming that unless someone else proves that it isn’t the case, then it must be true because it sounds plausible to you. It’s possible that it’s true that it affected him in ways that he still remembers. It’s also possible that it didn’t affect him that much. Unless you have a citation showing that he’s ever addressed the issue, we have no way of telling.
[spoiler]Are you sure about the lawyer? Obviously, the doctor. But I was uncertain about the lawyer. It seemed to me that it was only the doctor that they said had been arrested and then released (presumably after having been “turned to the dark side”). I wasn’t sure that the lawyer had been implicated.
Also, did you figure out how it was supposed to work with the rich jews and the false doctor and the black book? Who knew what? Are you saying that the lawyer was systematically turning over his rich clients? Why was the doctor a false doctor? What did that (and the appendix operation) add to the plot, if anything?[/spoiler]
. The movie is superb, with even minor characters given strong identities and repaying the director with excellent performances. They’re so good that you never doubt the characters no matter how wild the plot twists. The pacing of the movie is strong. Movies traditionally falter in the middle; this film’s best scenes are in the middle. The only flaw is that there’s too much plot packed in the last hour. You can both enjoy this film as a serious rumination on one’s reaction to times of evil or as a straight ahead action movie. I highly urge you to see it before it goes from the movie screens.