Zwartboek

They're called the movies because they're supposed to move.

That doesn't mean there aren't great movies that move very minimally, but nor does it mean they have to move frenetically, like some herky-jerky music video.

We find the beauty, the propulsion in controlled movement. The power of a director who knows how and when to move the camera and the elements in front of it, and how it will flow or slam into the following shot, how the movement will work with the subject to create a deeper, stronger, more moving and resonant meaning.

Two friends with reliable taste completely independently recommended that I go see Black Book (original Dutch title: Zwartboek) before it left the theaters, and my only regret is getting the good word out to you, valued reader, so late in the movie's run.

Director Paul Verhoeven first made his name with a series of Dutch films that imported some classical Hollywood action and suspense values to European cinema in the 1970's and early 80's. Then he came to Hollywood and made some big, successful movies. A few years ago he headed back to Holland to get back to his roots and old writing partner Gerard Soeteman, and resurrected a script containing elements that didn't quite fit into some of the movies they made back then -- the ones that put Verhoeven on the map.

They had been kicking this one, a companion piece to Soldier of Orange (1977), for fifteen years. They finally cracked the story when they flipped the main character from male to female.

What coalesced is what one might categorize as a crackerjack World War II thriller, and while that's undeniable, there are levels to the movie which lift it well above simple genre work. It's a profoundly sophisticated thriller, an action-packed depiction of an unjust world where no matter the title, nothing is in black and white.

The plot follows a Jewish Dutch woman (played unforgettably by Carice van Houten) forced out of hiding by Nazi violence into the arms of the Dutch Resistance, and by that group into the arms of a Nazi officer. Along the way she changes her name from Rachel to Ellis, dyes her hair and becomes another one of Verhoeven's signature blonds -- The 4th Man, Basic Instinct -- like Hitchcock, signifiers of danger and desire. Only unlike those pictures, we're not at arm's length but with her the entire time, including the framing sequence twelve years after on an Israeli kibbutz, where the final point of the film comes boldly clear.

I won't go into too many details, but a number of things struck me about the movie. For one, we're in Dashiell Hammett territory, an unstable world of shifting alliances and identity, of heroes and villains flipping back and forth with an almost sexualized urgency. Perfect for Verhoeven, who's sexual frankness and well-placed fetishes (1940's garter belts, unenhanced breasts) seem as non-American as you can get and make the whole movie seem so much more frank as well.

Another element of the picture that must certainly be intentional is the post-Iraq invasion tenor of the presentation, somehow underlining how quickly and unfortunately we've moved from a post-9/11 world, where the most graphic horror on the world stage was inflicted on America, to a world that sees instead the great horrors America has delivered to Iraq, a country and people that had nothing at all to do with the attack on us.

The Resistance fighters are routinely referred to as "terrorists" by the Nazis, and this is used as justification for torturing and executing such citizens at will. One torture scene, no accident, depicts brutal water torture, a version of the waterboarding performed on Iraqis at U.S. run Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison. One supporting character, a sisterly woman who befriends our hero, ends up with a Canadian soldier for heaven's sake -- don't tell me a pre-Iraq Invasion production wouldn't have made that man an American. But today, that would surely have caused loud scoffing in European and world theaters.

Verhoeven has depicted fascism successfully in the past, satirically in Robocop and also as critique in Starship Troopers, so here he's even more deeply in the element with actual swastikas and occupational repression. But while the Nazi's cruel sweep and vindictiveness is a given, the big game is to expose, Sorrow and the Pity-like certain myths of the Dutch Resistance, and in an oddly pacifist way alter even how we view images of Dutch women who slept with Nazis having their heads shaved in the public square right after the war.

For while the Zwartboek world is unjust, a world where a foot may have to be washed in a toilet and a poor soul will be bathed in shit, where Christianity is just a weakly competing enforcer and those with advantage will, nine times out of ten, use it ruthlessly for personal gain, it is also a deeply humanistic world, one we experience through the eyes of Rachel/Ellis a woman in extreme personal danger from the moment we meet up with her in her Anne Frank-style hiding place in the farm home of a Dutch family.

We follow her through the explosions and machine gun battles, the deadly risks and treacherous reversals. We're following her in fascinating motion from so early on, essentially in one long chase movie, flowing from scene to scene on an assured river of suspense, immensely satisfying as a well-told story made even more as a fresh but responsible historical vision. Even her hair -- not the hard-cut, castrating blondes of Verhoeven's earlier blondes, but with the pre-conditioner curls and and wispy, frizzing ends of my grandmother's day -- has a welcome accuracy as it glides across the screen.

I had been excited at the first news of the movie from showings in Europe, thinking this would be that perfect storm of Verhoeven's Hollywood education applied to European cinema, then after gleaning what I now think is a snobbishness from some American critics who made it seem that the action overwhelmed the integrity of the subject matter, what now appears like a need to keep the Paul Verhoeven who gave us Total Recall and, most damnably, Showgirls, in some kind of opportunistic, lunkheaded box, I lost interest.

It turns out my first instinct was right. Sure, it's a great suspense/action picture, but it can also play with last year's most lauded revival, Army of Shadows (1969), which depicted the effect of participating in the WWII French Underground on its members. As one of those two friends said to me, it's a movie that turns real history into a thrilling plot in order to tell a greater truth. And if the last shot of Black Book is the key to unlocking the final door to that truth, it's a haunting one on a personal level and on an ultimately political, all too relevant one as well.

Never forget.