The stories simple, a Jewish girl falls in love with an SS officer in occupied Holland. Performances are strong and the whole thing looks gorgeous, more film noir or 50s melodrama than the standard post Private Ryan blanched pallet and shaky camera. The film's thoughtful and thought provoking without ever being anything less than superb entertainment(for a whole two and a half hours!). But then this is a Paul Verhoeven film and other people aren't going to see it that way, despite the more traditional setting this is typically divisive stuff.
Even with my predilection for horror/cartoons/sci-fi and other lowbrow/genre films I often place Verhoeven's work firmly in the guilty pleasures category. The lurid mix of sex and violence portrayed in glossy Hollywood style is just so un-reconstructed it's hard not to feel slightly bad about enjoying it. But to me it always seems Verhoeven best stuff is all about this dissonance, making you laugh at something inappropriate or unexpected, taking a scene slightly further than he should in polite company; Black Book pulls of this kind of stuff time after time. As Picasso said; Good taste is the enemy of creativity (or something like that anyway, that's how lazy I've become, I can't even be bothered to Google these things any more) and I think this films is further evidence for truth in that statement.
IMDB
5 comments:
Hmm, interesting! I know I get all my critical info from the Guardian, but PB in his review said this was dire exploitative soft-porn trash! I suppose your review doesn't contradict that- perhaps it's GOOD soft-porn trash!
My guide to the Guardian's film reviews: Philip French is right, Peter Bradshaw is wrong. (c.f. French's Black Book review)
All the negative reviews I've seen are totally fixated on the female nudity which is kind of strange as to be honest I didn't think there wasn't that much. Certainly not as much as one of the panel on Newsnight Review asserted i.e. that the heroine spent the entire second half of the film naked which isn't even remotely true.
obviously the French = right, Bradshaw = wrong thing only works if the disagree about a film.
French is such a crusty, boring old git though!
yeah i didn't mean he was an entertaining writer or anything, i just tend to find that his opinion is usually more closely aligned with mine.
Post a Comment