Movies: Zwartboek (Black Book)

I'm generally not a fan of war movies, but I went to see this anyway, knowing little more than that it was about World War II, was in Dutch, and featured a pretty girl (Carice van Houten, who turns out to be much more than just a pretty girl).

It's a story we know well—European Jews in hiding—and a story we don't know much about at all: the German occupation of Holland and the counter-strategies of the Dutch Resistance. Introduced via flashback from an Israeli kibbutz in 1956, the plot follows the pretty, perky, saucy, and quick-witted Rachel Stein during the occupation as she moves from hiding spot to hiding spot, soon connecting with the Resistance. It's not long before her good looks and chance timing, not to mention her moxie-extraordinaire, land her a post at Nazi headquarters itself as secretary cum sextoy—disguised, of course, as chipper blonde shikselah Ellis du Vries. It is here that she does her most useful work for the Resistance, installing a bug in an important office and helping coordinate plans to free prisoners quartered in the basement; meanwhile, her initial role of "service" is becoming a budding love-affair with the Hauptmeister Müntze (Sebastian Koch, of The Lives of Others), who quickly discovered her true identity, but kept her secret to himself.

From this point on, the plot is filled with delicious (as far as plots are concerned) and abominable (as far as history is concerned) twists—of double-crossing, triple-crossing, informing and worse, driven more by potential profit than to simply save one's skin, as Resistance plans are repeatedly foiled and Müntze and Ellis are sentenced to death by the Nazis. With the assistance of the only other woman at HQ, to whom Ellis has let slip at least part of her secret, the two escape and go into hiding for a brief time, until V-day brings German capitulation and Canadian soldiers parading in the streets. But all isn't well; Müntze's death warrant still stands, and the Resistance, believing that Ellis herself betrayed them, are hungry for her punishment. She is punished indeed, but this time at the hands of her ill-behaved "liberators" as a Nazi conspirator; we see women in the streets being publicly shamed, their hair shaven, dressed in rags and wearing signs that read "Nazi Whore." Ellis, who has used her body again and again to buy safety, refuses to strip naked for the amusement of drunken Englishmen and is therefore stripped forcibly, beaten, and rained upon by feces.

The seed of the "hope" of Israel was planted in our minds at the film's start, and we begin to wonder whether it isn't true that Jews indeed need a homeland where they might protect themselves from the viciously-manifested hate that targets them. And yet, our first seed of doubt is planted at this moment, when we see the liberators behaving, as an official comes to chide them, "as bad as the Nazis." The tree of doubt, however, comes into full blossom, with a trunk of hopelessness, branches of sorrow, and leaves of anxiety, at the film's very end, when Rachel wakes from her reverie to find herself back in Israel. Her husband and two children find her at the shore and walk her back to the kibbutz, which we suddenly realize she has founded herself, funded by the money stolen from her family and other wealthy Jews who were tricked into trying to cross into safe territory with all of their money and jewels on their bodies (hence double-crossing, triple-crossing, informing, and worse). As their car pulls into the gates of the kibbutz, we see young men running out with rifles and hear airplanes overhead. The fighting begins again, and, as we know, has yet to end. And that is the most horrifying part.