Black Book
When the first scene of Black Book is set in Israel, as the recollections of a middle-aged teacher confronted with a face from a past that's twenty-five years ago and a thousand miles away, I assumed it was just the same tired narrative device I feel like I've seen in a thousand tedious biopics. I figured it was either that or the “Hey remember back when...” framing device used for events of great historical import as an attempt to ground them in the modern world, like an aged Private Ryan visiting a French cemetery.
In Zwartboek, there is instead this underlying sense that Rachel would prefer to never in her daily life see any reminders of the events that took place in Arnhem in the early 40's, or her role in the Dutch resistance, but it is not clear at the beginning if this is meant simply to heighten the gravity of the oncoming flashback (which is hardly necessary for this film). In the final moments of the film, Rachel concludes her day and heads home amidst air raid sirens into a kibbutz lined with barbed wire, as her new home, is either enmired in the Yom Kibbur War or soon will be. I felt this overwhelming sadness for Rachel, seeing her walk in past guard towers and gates, like an inverted concentration camp where Jews went to stay alive and erected barbed wire fences to keep others out. The sense I felt was that while Holland had long since moved on and had joined a pact to never allow the horror of war to sweep over Europe again, Rachel lives in the one place in the world where World War II never ended, where the Holocaust loomed over her new country's birth and in '73 had to seem to somebody who suffered like Rachel that it was finally concluding with the violent end of the Jewish state.
So her evasiveness, her reluctance to admit to being Rachel from Arnhem, possibly even to seeing herself that way, may indicate that she is unable to look back at the war and the Holocaust because she for her they didn't end with the liberation of Arnhem. That theme is clear in the film, as all of Holland celebrates and children and hot chicks all pile onto American tanks to ride through town, while Rachel's resistance cell continues their hunt for traitors. I didn't really connect all that until I started thinking about the ending, which was interesting.
Zodiac
The closing music and the final line of Zodiac gave me one of the only real chills I had in the entire film, since I seem to have developed an allergy to slavishly sequential cultural and historical mimesis that really took me out of the film (if I just wanted to know what happened next I could have watched one of the fifty-seven documentaries or read one of I'm sure countless books written on the subject). Notably none of the big stars were in the scene, which returns to the stark and grisly murder that serves as the film's opening, as the surviving witness identifies his attacker from a photo array. The affected flatness of his reaction, studying the face and commenting on features, before calmly concluding “...the last time I saw that face was in 1967 when he shot me,” giving way to Donovan's “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and the closing credits, sent the second chill up my spine (the first is when Jake Gyllenhaal realizes he's talking to a man with a basement).
Despite all the diversions and obsessions of the film, and the random irrelevance of the actual crimes that Robert Downey Jr expounds on during the film, there is a specter that lingers over the case and the film, a dull and unreasoning yet grimly elusive bogey man whose spirit was never laid to rest. (And of course the chill Minnesota wind picks up as I write this and I hear noises from downstairs that I hope were my windows creaking... I really need to stop getting into creepy topics and slighting serial killers right before going to bed.)
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