The Cinematheque

“About as freewheeling as a World War II movie can get while maintaining a sense of perspective about the reality of the war … Hauer’s effortlessly charismatic performance and a scampering, devil-may-care energy that manifests itself in Jost Vacano’s aggressive, largely handheld camerawork [are] the film’s greatest assets.”

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AV Club

“Embellishment is unavoidable,” Paul Verhoeven has said, referring to Soldier of Orange, his episodic film based on a WWII memoir. From the capitulation of Rotterdam in 1940 to the war’s end, the film follows the aristocratic Erik Lanshof (Rutger Hauer) and the way his actions—as part of university hazing rituals, anti-Nazi resistance efforts, and air force exploits—get summed up as heroism. Yet Verhoeven, making a film that augured the Hollywood chapter of his career that would follow, is interested in the stray details that escape this label. His landscape of wartime Netherlands includes a Jules et Jim-esque ménage à trois, evidence disposed of in excrement, and, whether friend or foe, a mixture of ill-timed action, mistaken loyalty, and pleasure seeking. The film’s most iconic image involves dinner-jacket-wearing motorcyclists. Verhoeven would later repurpose research for Soldier of Orange toward what some have called his masterpiece, the WWII-set Black Book.

In Dutch and German with English subtitles

“Quite a change from most war movies … [Most] are either blockbusters in which the human values get totally lost, or they’re intimate little stories in which we never feel the overwhelming reality of war—but Soldier of Orange seems to get both dimensions in focus.” Roger Ebert, At the Movies

Preceded by a 6:00 pm reception.