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Paul Verhoeven's verve is visible in the Holocaust imagery of the opening, bald-headed men rounded up in a darkened chamber for what turns out to be an elaborately vicious bit of frat-house hazing. (The model, the Losey of Accident, is splendidly accelerated.) The panoramic joke is that sometimes it takes a war to pull the privileged young away from the tennis club, thus Holland from 1938 to the Liberation as seen by reformed hedonists, out of college and into the resistance. Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbé, granite jaws in tuxedos off to England on anti-Nazi missions. A Jewish pugilist (Huib Rooymans), a clandestine transmitter operator (Eddy Habbema), an underground leader (Lex van Delden) and a German-blooded colleague (Derek de Lint) contribute their own vantage points. History's forward momentum plus overlapping Hawksian triangles, "gentility belongs to the past." Eschewing the posture of patriotism, Verhoeven fills his canvas with the viscera from his early portraits of grotty relationships: People are forced into betrayal and slaughter, heroism is a matter of mud and outhouses, "to scrape through" is the true goal. When not shuffling gamely between Habbema and his fiancée (Belinda Meuldijk) or between Krabbé and the tart RAF secretary (Susan Penhaligon), Hauer goes undercover in a swastika-festooned soiree and bumps into an old colleague: "Oh, it's war. And it's a nice party." The virile camerawork draws on The Longest Day and The Battle of Britain, among others, and improves markedly on them—the bombing raid takes place on Christmas Eve, with intercutting between one of the protagonists tortured in a concentration camp and his comrade in the air. The most astute analysis is the director's own thirty years later in Black Book, "a woman's view." With Edward Fox, Dolf de Vries, Peter Faber, and Andrea Domburg.
--- Fernando F. Croce |