With the primarily Dutch language movie Black Book, director Paul Verhoeven returns to his European filmmaking roots. Back in the ‘70s, Verhoeven was working in Holland, where he made films including The Fourth Man and Turkish Delight, which was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category in 1974. Flush with his successes, Verhoeven moved on to Hollywood in the late ‘80s and hit cinematic gold with the sci-fi flick Total Recall and the erotic thriller Basic Instinct, a film that made actress Sharon Stone a superstar. (He also crafted the much-maligned Showgirls about a young drifter’s attempts to become a Las Vegas dancer.)  

With a sweeping score and the claim that the film was inspired by true events, Black Book is Verhoeven’s Schindler’s List, a movie set among the atrocities of World War II. Filmed in the director’s native Netherlands with a cast of European actors, Black Book begins in earnest when a young Jewish woman named Rachel Stein (played by a radiant Carice Van Houten) tries to escape the German-occupied Holland.

After getting through a Nazi checkpoint, Stein and a flock of other Jews are corralled onto a barge by a supposed Jewish sympathizer. In one of Black Book’s most memorable (and devastating) scenes, a boatload of machine gun toting Nazis emerge from the darkness and mow down all the Jews except for Stein, who manages to escape.

From there, Stein ends up falling in with a group of Dutch Resistance fighters. When a handful of the clan are captured by the Nazis, Stein is enlisted to infiltrate the local German stronghold and seduce the region’s head of the Gestapo, Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch of The Lives of Others.) It turns out that Muntze has a soft spot for both Stein and stamp collecting.

The premise may sound ridiculous on paper, but Stein and Muntze begin to have romantic feelings for one another despite the fact that one’s a Jew and the other is a Nazi. It’s a testament to both Van Houten and Koch’s acting abilities that this set-up feels totally believable.

The rest of Black Book comes on with a set-up similar to The Departed. Basically, the audience knows that Stein has successfully penetrated the German compound—she even gets to help decorate a celebration for the Führer’s birthday—but the viewer is not made privy to the identity of an informant among the Resistance fighters’ ranks until the end.

At almost two and a half hours, Verhoeven takes a little too much time getting to the point where Stein discovers who keeps foiling the Resistance’s plans from the inside. Despite this, Van Houten makes all of the proceedings a pleasure to watch. She is equally adept at showing Stein’s playful side—like an early scene where her character sings along to a song on the radio while using a carrot as a fake microphone—as illustrating the Jewish woman’s unease at being chummy with a Nazis officer named Franken, who oversaw the extermination of her fellow Jews on the boat near the beginning of the film.

Despite its flaws, Black Book is a promising start to the third chapter of Verhoeven’s career.

BLACK BOOK ( * * ½ )

Directed by Paul Verhoeven. • Starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch and Thom Hoffman. • R, 145 min. • At the Century Cinemas Del Monte Center.