black book (zwartboek) 2006 region free dvd5 dutch bcbc

Black Book (Dutch: Zwartboek) is a 2006 Dutch World War II thriller film co-written and directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, and Halina Reijn. The film, credited as based on several true events and characters, is about a young Jewish woman in the Netherlands who becomes a spy for the resistance during World War II after tragedy befalls her in an encounter with the Nazis. The film had its world premiere on 1 September 2006 at the Venice Film Festival and its public release on 14 September 2006 in the Netherlands. It is Verhoeven's first film made in the Netherlands since The Fourth Man, made in 1983 before moving to the United States.



The press in the Netherlands was positive; with three Golden Calves Black Book was the film which won the most awards at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2006. The international press responded positively as well, especially to the performance of Van Houten. It was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language, and was the Dutch submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007, but was not nominated.



At the time of release, it was the most expensive Dutch film ever made, and also the Netherlands' most commercially successful, with that country's highest box office gross of 2006. In 2008, the Dutch public voted it the best Dutch film ever.



Contains movie and Optional English, French, Spanish Subtitles. No menus or extras. Regular DVD quality. Thank you.

Spoken Languages: Dutch (some German, English, Hebrew)

















Synopsis

Rachel Stein is a beautiful Jewish woman who averts Nazi capture, then assumes a new Aryan identity and joins the Dutch resistance movement. A local leader persuades her to seduce a Nazi commander and take down the enemy from within.



Cast

Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn, Waldemar Kobus, Derek de Lint, Christian Berkel, Dolf de Vries, Michiel Huisman



BLACK BOOK

By: Ben Walters

Posted: Thursday October 19 2006

In our earliest glimpse of Rachel (Carice van Houten), the Jewish heroine of ‘Black Book’, she is being called for breakfast. ‘If the Jews had listened to Jesus,’ grumbles the father of the Dutch family sheltering her, ‘they wouldn’t be in such a mess now.’ It is September, 1944. Rachel drizzles a crucifix of jam into her porridge, smiles ingratiatingly, and vigorously stirs.



Vigorous stirring is Paul Verhoeven’s stock-in-trade. As the Netherlands’ most successful filmmaker of the ’70s and ’80s, he alienated critics and funders with his frank treatment of aggression, libido and ethical equivocacy. Following his move to America, his use of sex and violence in the likes of ‘Robocop’, ‘Basic Instinct’ and ‘Showgirls’ prompted further consternation, now compounded by his willingness to play as fast and loose with expectations of genre as he always had with character and narrative; ‘Starship Troopers’, for instance, was accused of promoting the very fascistic tendencies it satirised. Uniquely, Verhoeven makes populist films that challenge audiences to keep their distance – to acknowledge that the character with the most lines might not be a nice person, that plot can be a conspiracy against reason, that violent or sexual behaviour can be both more and less consequential than Hollywood convention insists.



In short, his pictures thrive on irony, and the superb, gripping ‘Black Book’ is a double-faced affair. His first Dutch production in two decades uses Rachel’s experiences to hold a glass to the little-examined period of Dutch history around the end of WW2. Her family lost, the former singer falls in with a Resistance cell, is given a new identity and infiltrates the local SS HQ via a liaison with senior officer Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch). As the Nazis crumble and Rachel begins to glean the contents of the titular logbook, however, she realises she may have less to fear from the disarmingly decent Müntze than the ‘heroes’ of the underground or a vengeful public.



For Verhoeven, the ostensibly heroic and dutiful are rarely distinguishable from the venal and inane; even ‘Soldier of Orange’ (1977), adapted from the memoirs of one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated WW2 fighter pilots, presented the war more as gratifying adventure than noble struggle. That film’s Hague liberation sequence was blithely jubilant; its counterpart here is a nightmare ordeal, in keeping with the plot’s other reversals of historical expectation. Such reversals divorce the global from the personal and focus attention on Rachel’s bizarrely ambivalent position as the Jew singing at the Nazi soirée.



Like ‘Katie Tippel’ (1975) and ‘Showgirls’, ‘Black Book’ charts the progress of a woman set on survival and independence and willing to use sex. Rachel is more sympathetic, but just as canny, and she takes to her role-playing life with aplomb. Van Houten’s barnstorming performance, accentuated by a bold, saturated palette, makes comparisons to Garbo and Jean Harlow plausible, but Rachel is far from the only character well-versed in the uses of glamour. A noble visage or political assumption might distort as much as a small black book reveals. Best not judge by covers.