Paul Verhoeven time-travels back to 1881 to flesh out Neel Doff's rags-to-riches memoirs, though any fears of the director falling into Merchant-Ivory period tastefulness have been blasted long before the tawny heroine (Monique Van de Ven) spots the rock-hard erection about to deflower her as shadow puppetry. She and her dirt-poor clan find their new rat-infested home in Amsterdam not that big an improvement from their previous hole, so it's up to the youngsters (the daughters, of course) to put food on the table. Vivacious Van de Ven gives laundering a go, but since she cannot go one shift without dunking a razzing co-worker's head into the caustic suds, it's not long before she discovers her yummy bod as her meal ticket, first exploited in the brothel where her piggy sister toils. From there it is but a step to the pavements, at least until she bumps into ambitious society heel Rutger Hauer, Van de Ven's match in sexual athleticism from Turkish Delight. Verhoeven and writer Gerard Soeteman raid Doff's novelette for squalor, bodily fluids and general bad manners, though carnality remains the motif -- indeed, sex is just as ubiquitous in corseted, 19th-century Holland as in the contemporary Amsterdam of Verhoeven's early hit, yet the vigorous fucking that signaled a childish innocence in the previous film here curdles harshly into whoring, the basis for exploitation upon which every relationship in the plot is built. Whether it is her body (traded for TB medicine) or her image (sold as modeling), the heroine quickly becomes schooled in the politics of sex, and Verhoeven is boldly upfront about the mechanics -- a cut segues from her first john to a butcher slicing a side of beef. Critics can dismiss it as softcore romping all they want, but Van de Ven is there for the appropriately vampiristic finale, drained of her radicalism, having learned all to well to "stoop to conquest." With Andrea Domburg, Jan Blaaser, Eddie Brugman, and Hannah de Leeuwe.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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