I've always maintained a warm spot for the films of Paul Verhoeven. RoboCop is one of the smartest, most acid satires on corporate capitalism, not to mention eminently more watchable than any reeled species of manufactured dissent by Michael Moore or Tim Robbins. (The frequent news interludes that peppered this gory and bleak cyborg dystopia were worth the price of admission: the weather satellite that precipitates natural disasters and kills vacationing ex-presidents; the Battleship-like board game centered on nuclear annihilation; the gargantuan 6000 SUX sports car advertised as bigger than Godzilla, “An American Tradition.")
Part of Verhoeven's appeal stems from his love of kitsch and a willingness to transform B-movie subjects (and B-movie dialogue) into blockbuster entertainment. Basic Instinct without his direction would been the most lucrative screenplay Joe Eszterhaus ever sold to Cinemax AfterHours. The underrated Starship Troopers, which, as a smart Robert Heinlein novel, provided him with an ideal blend of sci-fi pulp (giant bugs, intergalactic warfare) and political cynicism (citizenship was purchased through military enlistment, and jingoism topped the list of deadly virtues).
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, as a Dutchman, Verhoeven treats vulgarity – physical or emotional – with a kind of vaudevillian exuberance that seems more attuned to the seedy cosmopolitan stages of Weimar than to the soft-lit lens of Hollywood. This is another of saying it was only a matter of time before he tackled fascism. Verhoeven's latest film is entitled Black Book, and Manohla Dargis thinks it’s great, sick, brilliant fun:
The thrashing rarely lets up in “Black Book,” a film in which a Jewish woman’s body is saved from the off-camera death camps, gas chambers and ovens to become a site of negotiation, a means of survival and an erotic spectacle. Abused and misused, stripped and stripped again, Rachel — named, it’s worth noting, for the mother of Israel — survives by masking that body with a putatively Aryan disguise. She also falls for a Nazi.
Not any old Nazi, but the head of the Gestapo in The Hague, where Rachel has landed after fleeing an ambush that claims her brother and parents. Now working for the resistance, Rachel signs up for the ultimate Mata Hari assignment and agrees to bed Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) so she can uncover Gestapo secrets. She does that and more. After dyeing her hair a brassy blond, Rachel insinuates herself into the superdashing Nazi’s confidences and, soon enough, his bedroom. It takes just one glance at the top of her head with its creeping dark roots for Müntze to guess the truth. Grasping her naked breasts in her hands, Rachel pleads her case with Shakespearean gravitas, “Hath not a Jew, er, eyes?”
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