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Storybooks have pretty pictures, says Paul Verhoeven, and sometimes they're put to best use by wiping soiled bottoms. Lines of transactional inequality are drawn at the onset, aboard the ship to Amsterdam there are those in the cabin and those in the hold, La Marseillaise is something the poor father (Jan Blaaser) warbles for a drink. Squalor and luxury ca. 1881, a painterly view (Steen and van Honthorst are visible) for the scrappy eponymous lass (Monique van de Ven). "The wild one?" "The fighter." She gives laundering a go but dunks a razzing colleague's face into caustic suds in a slice of Zolaesque mayhem, at the shop a wicked joke (amid shadow puppets, the boss' engorged outline) sets up her bloody deflowering. Her body is her best tool, it gets her medicine in a time of tuberculosis and takes over from her sister (Hannah de Leeuwe) as the street-walking breadwinner—Verhoeven is admirably blunt, the novice fumbles with her first john while Mom (Andrea Domburg) contemplates a pink slab by the butcher's window. A fling with the boulevardier (Rutger Hauer) points the way toward high society, a cabaret ditty has the approach ("Stoop to Conquer"). Preminger's Forever Amber is a key forerunner, a comic understanding of the girl with a sweet tooth bouncing from flooded dump to brothel to bourgeois abode to protest march. High times at the sanitarium (a nun's candle for the dying merely causes pain from melted wax, a bit worthy of Franju), sword and tunic as the Muse of the Revolution for a modeling gig. "Workers have pride, nobility..." "They have empty stomachs." The guttersnipe turned lady like the exploitation cinéaste with a period piece, a touch of the vampire at the end of the road. "Let the moralizers talk!" With Eddie Brugman, Peter Faber, and Riet Henius.
--- Fernando F. Croce |