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Jim goes Dutch with Paul Verhoeven’s Katie Tippel.
Tags: i do movies badlyjim rohnerkatie tippelpaul verhoeven
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I wouldn’t describe Katie’s family as “fleeing” to Amsterdam, it’s just a standard story of leaving their small town for a big city (in the same country). I also didn’t see Katie as having that much pity on the petit bourgeoisie bank customers, she just didn’t really like doing that work herself (understandable given the treatment she got), although I could be forgetting the details of her reaction. For that reason I also wouldn’t find the epilogue implausible: she liked the material comforts that came with money (even if she wasn’t quite as ambitious as Hugo) and goes from one rich guy to another. I am glad it wasn’t included, because it would be somewhat out of place in a movie that’s mostly a continuous from A-to-B story of a period in her life. I guess that would also be standing in judgment of her, whereas most of the movie is not.
I also disagree about none of the nudity being titillating. Much of it isn’t, but some of it is. When Mina is performing on the couch, it’s for audiences on both sides of the fourth wall. Katie is more of a character (whereas Mina is completely on one side of the Madonna-whore dichotomy), but some of her nudity is also played as fun rather than clinical or miserable. Verhoeven of course uses nudity both for titillation and the opposite in his films (for the latter I’ll point to the treatment of collaborators at the end of Black Book).