She’s there to spy, but, darn it all, they hit it off. (Your family got wiped out in the war? My family got wiped out in the war!) Even when Rachel’s “roots” start showing, something draws them together. He collects stamps, after all, while his dungeons echo with the howls of tortured souls. Maybe these two lovebirds from different worlds can make a go of it and in true romantic-comedy fashion achieve a utopian reconciliation of opposites. Or maybe Müntze is just really, really stupid.
If so, he has lots of company in this film. There’s little mystery about who’s double-crossing who; Verhoeven fingers everyone with the hoariest of cinematic tipoffs. But Verhoeven himself is not stupid. While the plot mechanics creak on, sly bits of satiric insight glitter. Blink and you might not notice that Kuipers is a Communist — in which case you won’t fully comprehend the tragi-comedy of errors that occurs following the “Liberation.” You might overlook the sudden swarming of Israeli soldiers into the kibbutz at the very end of the film, a seeming precursor of the Suez crisis of 1956. It’s a throw-away finale recalling the archly ambiguous last scene of Starship Troopers, and it underscores the gleeful pessimism underlying Verhoeven’s high jinks. When Rachel mutters at one gloomy point, “It never ends,” that’s not just another cliché.
