Zwartboek (Black Book) review

 Number 435 on the top 1000 films of all time is the Paul Verhoeven's Dutch WW2 film Zwartboek which translates as Black Book.

Rachel Stein (Carice Van Houten) is a famed Jewish singer during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. When her hiding place is destroyed and her family are murdered by the SS, she joins the Dutch resistance. She is tasked by high-ranking resistance member Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman) to seduce the Gestapo leader Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch.) This was all based on a true story.

In war films, it is all too easy to say that these are the good characters and these are the bad characters. but the reality is never that black and white. And that was all part of Verhoeven's vision. He definitely succeeded. We'll take glamorous heroine Rachel Stein as an example. Victim of Nazi persecution, she makes an obvious hero. However, she then falls in love with the Nazi official that she's seducing. The Nazi official Muntze quickly realises she is a Jew, but he has also fallen in love with her. And he is much fairer than his brutal deputy Gunther Franken (Waldermar Kobus.) Realising the war is lost, Muntze secretly negotiates a ceasefire with the Dutch resistance.

*spoiler alert*

When the Netherlands is liberated at the end of the war, Muntze is executed for his crimes and Rachel is locked up as a supposed Nazi collaborator. Her fellow Dutch compatriots treat her and the other supposed collaborators deplorably: humiliating them by forcing them to strip naked. But then Akkermans, now an army colonel, breaks things up and declares them no better than the Nazis. And this scene is not difficult to imagine happening in real life. The Dutch are angry at their treatment and want to take out their anger on anything they can.

As the two leads, Van Houten and Koch gave a lot of nuance to character who ran the risk of being flatly good and bad.  But it was these fundamental flaws that made all these characters so human and relatable. even the burtal Franken is a keen singer/ballroom dancer. To have characters be simply good or simply bad would be far too two-dimensional and cliche.  And Hoffman shone as the true villain of the piece. 

*more spoilers*

Hans Akkerman, despite being a high-level member of the resistance, is actually a secret Nazi collaborator.  Rachel Stein and her family try escaping to safety by boarding a boat that will carry them down the river. They are discovered by the SS and Rachel is the only one who escapes with her life. It is later revealed that Hans set this up, so he could steal whatever money the refugees had. This is entirely believable as well. Everybody becomes desperate in war. And loyalties can change at the drop of the hat.

Van Herhoeven perfectly captured the brutality of war: from the SS gunning down escaping Jews to them torturing one of the captured resistance fighters. He certainly pulled no punches. He succeeded in creating a harrowing tale of human morality and I'll end this review on his assessment of Zwartboek: "in this movie everything has a shade of grey. There are no people who are completely good no people who are completely bad. It's like life. It's not very Hollywoodian."