Showgirl

Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven, can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could be titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse, who saw her family massacred by Nazis, struggles to survive in occupied Holland, joining the Dutch resistance and romancing an SS commandant.

Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned, yet fashionably embittered, movie. (It’s also the most expensive that Holland has ever produced.) Copious cheap thrills are presented with high-noon clarity, despite the misty moral confusion that renders many Dutch characters no better than their German conquerors. Bringing it all back home, Verhoeven has created the antithesis of his last World War II saga, the rueful, civilized resistance drama Soldier of Orange (itself once the most lavish of Dutch movies). Two decades in Tinseltown, with prolonged exposure to the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas and Joe Eszterhas, have surely honed Verhoeven’s perversity. Some found the monstrous bugs in his intergalactic raid campaign Starship Troopers more sympathetic than the film’s humanoids.

Moral relativism reigns, but, blessed with a resourceful and attractive protagonist (Carice van Houten as Rachel Stein), Black Book doesn’t dwell on it. The movie whips along, unafraid of narrative excess or hairpin plot turns. Verhoeven, 68, was an impressionable child during the Nazi occupation (“It was like big special effects in the sky,” he told The New York Times), and the war is presented as a remembered welter of sensations.

Cool, courageous, free-spirited and loyal to a fault, Rachel is compared at various points to Jean Harlow and Greta Garbo. She survives a bloodbath, is smuggled to safety in a coffin, and enlists with the underground. In the course of her duties, she meets a handsome Gestapo officer (Sebastian Koch, here, as in The Lives of Others, the lone good German in a schweinehund world).

Rachel’s comrades assign her to first infiltrate the officer’s bed and then his headquarters. In an unmistakable Verhoeven touch, she bleaches her pubic hair blond; in another characteristic twist, the SS man immediately figures out that this curiously obliging cutie must be a Jew, but desire wins out.

Verhoeven has insisted that Black Book, which he and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman began working on 20 years ago, is based on historical cases, though no specific source is given.

With few exceptions, Rachel is exploited, vilified and sold out by her gentile countrymen. “I never thought I’d dread liberation,” she finally says. That’s the movie’s melancholy moral. Repeatedly buried and resurrected, she is, like the hero of RoboCop and Verhoeven’s planned Jesus movie, another of his non-Christian Christs.