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That's nasty The other Verhoeven brings political bite to Berlin and Beyond By Dennis Harveya&eletters@sfbg.com The reference books are full of famous directors whose work ossified as they got older. In contrast, a select few filmmakers experience second – or maybe even first – bursts of creative youth in their later years. Michael Verhoeven, who'll receive a lifetime achievement award as principal tributee at this year's Berlin and Beyond festival, was already in his 50s when his The Nasty Girl (Das Schreckliche Mädchen) lit up 1990's Berlin International Film Festival. Many international viewers unfamiliar with Verhoeven's prior features assumed Nasty Girl to be a young man's debut effort, so much did it reflect the brashness, idealism, and high energy of its titular heroine, who, as indelibly played by Lena Stolze, becomes the darling of her Bavarian hamlet when she wins a prestigious essay contest. She becomes something else entirely – including an assassination target – when her follow-up project, "My Town during the Third Reich," excavates gung-ho Nazism this heimat preferred to keep well buried. That the frisky, mordantly funny Nasty Girl juiced Verhoeven's sense of stylistic adventure and crusading prankdom would have surprised less had he been better known by his new worldwide audience. Sonja's impish, stubborn commitment to get at the truth – however unpleasant – is close to the writer-director's own character and his motivation as an artist. Which seems presumptuous to speak about, if it wasn't well mapped in The Verhoevens, a 2003 documentary playing Berlin and Beyond as part of the tribute. The titular clan (no relation to Dutch-born Showgirls auteur Paul V., by the way) is one of those showbiz dynasties, it turns out, albeit less dominated by offscreen misbehavior than your basic Barrymore model. Patriarch Paul was a popular stage actor who became a popular movie actor-director. Though directing Goebbels's Czech mistress won him executive Reich approval, a bent toward frivolous musical comedies helped him avoid overtly propagandistic assignments – and Nazi Party membership. This relative blamelessness left him free to flourish anew via the escapist films a postwar German public desperately craved. But his passive cooperation with National Socialism tormented son Michael, whose rebellion against parental tradition (Mom was also an actress) initially took the form of choosing a medical profession over a theatrical one. Michael still hadn't decided to leave medicine behind when he directed his first feature – a rigorous 1967 film of Strindberg's play The Dance of Death, brilliantly acted by transatlantic star Lilli Palmer and the senior Verhoeven as snake and mongoose locked into bitterly terminal marriage – though he'd already wed "thinking man's Raquel Welch" Senta Berger. Like Palmer, Austrian beauty Berger was usually reduced to eye candy in Europudding projects. That wasn't the case in films directed by her husband, but the still-beautiful Eurobabe is MIA in his few US-released films to date. All scrutinize Nazi back-chapters: The Nasty Girl, 1982's The White Rose (also starring Stolze), and 1995's My Mother's Courage, about how Hungarian dramatist George Tabori's ma escaped concentration-camp doom. Cinematically vivid and morally upright, these are the kinds of movies every film festival wants to program. But in 1970, two decades before Nasty Girl won its Silver Bear, Michael Verhoeven virtually shuttered the Berlinale with O.K., a film that was reviled then and has scarcely been seen since. It so horrified official competition judge George Stevens – über-Hollywood director of Gunga Din, Shane, and Jesus's own Greatest Story Ever Told – that he basically called a halt to the entire event. O.K. reenacts the same real-life incident that later inspired Brian De Palma's more hyperbolic Casualties of War. In 1966, a teenage Vietnamese girl was kidnapped, gang-raped, murdered, and body-dumped by a bored US Army unit. Michael Verhoeven himself plays the one soldier who refused to participate and ultimately brought the others to some semblance of justice. No doubt more for the sake of budget than anything else, the feature was shot in the Bavarian woods, but the actors sport uniforms and names correlating with those of their Yankee "inspirations." At press time it's uncertain whether this extreme rarity, a last-minute addition to the schedule (Tues/17, 12:30 p.m.), will be shown with or without English translation. But believe me, you'll get the gist. A lost Vietnam-era masterpiece, it remains a profoundly tense, straightforward, and horrific mirror-stare into the eye of the human beast. But gosh, it's not like an accusatory drama about, say, abuses at Abu Ghraib could stir the same self-righteous outrage today. Eh? BERLIN AND BEYOND FILM FESTIVAL Jan. 12-18 Castro Theatre 429 Castro, SF $7-$30 (415) 263-8760 www.ticketweb.com www.goethe.de/sanfrancisco |
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