A heroine in Holland

Reviewed - Black Book/Zwartboek:Back when I was so much younger than today, I caused a minor scandal in Tralee when I featured an early movie from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, Turkish Delight, in the local film society programme.

The movie was sexually provocative from the opening scene, and it was one of the first collaborations between Verhoeven and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, which continued on similarly frank films, notably Spetters and The Fourth Man, before Verhoeven went to Hollywood in the mid-1980s.

20 years working on US blockbusters - RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers - Verhoeven returns home and reunites with Soeteman for Black Book, a war movie set in The Netherlands during the German occupation. Working wonders on a budget substantially less than what he had on his US pictures, Verhoeven skilfully orchestrates the many vigorous action sequences while indulging one of his primary preoccupations in liberally peppering the picture with nudity and sex scenes.

Black Book features the admirably spirited Carice van Houten as Rachel Steinn, a young German Jewish singer who survives the massacre of her family in the autumn of 1944. In The Hague she joins the Dutch resistance fighters led by a businessman (Derek de Lint) and a doctor (Thom Hoffman), and dyeing her hair blond, she assumes a new identity.

Rachel is willing to do anything to survive, even if this entails agreeing to seduce a Nazi commander (Sebastian Koch). And she proves resourceful time after time, as she needs to be given that the movie barely pauses every time she narrowly escapes capture before imperilling her again.

While Rachel emerges as a classical screen heroine, Verhoeven's film is unusually complex for its genre on the subject of heroes and villains, shading the protagonists on both sides of the conflict with questioning attitudes. And while the movie directly addresses and illustrates the human toll of the war, it remains primarily a traditional action adventure, one that is consistently eventful and expertly paced as it robustly powers along for its extended duration without ever flagging.