The recent successes of such films as Pan’s Labyrinth, Volver, and The Lives of Others at multiplexes is a welcome sign that art-house ghettos aren’t the only places for foreign-language films anymore. Art houses, like multiplexes, tend to foster certain expectations about the movies we go to see in them, and sometimes we miss out on what a film has to offer as a consequence. Paul Verhoeven’s big-budget drama Black Book, which opened last week at the Music Box and is now also playing at some more commercial venues, and Jafar Panahi’s low-budget comedy Offside, which opens this week at the Music Box, both confound expectations.
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The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis calls Verhoeven’s film “supremely vulgar” and “pretty much a hoot.” Up to a point I agree. It’s outrageous and provocative—after the war’s end, the heroine gets spattered with shit for collaborating—and Verhoeven’s melodramatic contrivances have inspired laughter in the past; here I’m not so sure. As someone who undervalued the political smarts of Basic Instinct and Showgirls when they first appeared, I’m probably not the best one to fault others for not taking Verhoeven seriously, but I still have to say that, ethically speaking, Black Book seems far less vulgar than a feel-good Holocaust movie like Schindler’s List. For starters, Spielberg works up loads of suspense about whether a bunch of Jewish women will be gassed at a Nazi camp, only to elicit grateful sighs of relief from us when they aren’t (the “gas chamber” turns out to be a shower). I seriously doubt that Verhoeven would ever stoop to such a ploy; he’s far less interested in stroking the middle-class sensibilities of Times readers. In fact, part of what I admire about Black Book is how it offers a kind of bracing rebuke to Schindler’s List, providing a much darker vision that refuses to let its audience off the hook so easily, though ostensibly it’s more fictional.
As with Black Book, Offside is so accessible and entertaining that some discerning viewers are suspicious of it. Even Richard Brody, whose capsule reviews in the New Yorker are usually far more sophisticated and better informed than their long reviews, finds it blandly sentimental and calls it “sweetened exoticism for export.” But what some critics are calling sentimentality may be simple humanism. Panahi refuses to make a villain out of anyone and I’m not persuaded that demonizing the mullahs who enforce gender apartheid (which bans girls from attending soccer matches, among other things) would have made us any wiser; showing the absurdity of the laws’ effects is all that’s needed.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Offside ★★★★
Directed by Jafar Panahi
