The director of Basic Instinct and Robocop celebrates his birthday today

Film director Paul Verhoeven, who turned 87 today, is one of the few who still remains a mystery to film critics. Some of them accuse him of bad taste or lack thereof, while others believe that he is just playing with film critics and viewers.

This duality was reflected in the perception of his films of the 90s, where he, it must be said, showed himself to be a true professional. Thus, in "Basic Instinct" he worked a miracle, turning the previously ordinary plump blonde Sharon Stone into a sex symbol. How he managed to do this is a mystery, but then Verhoeven did the same with Elizabeth Berkley in "Showgirls".

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However, if you rewatch "Basic Instinct" now, thirty years later, it looks like a mediocre erotic thriller, in which the only one who played worse than Michael Douglas was Sharon Stone herself. "Showgirls" is no worse, but, unlike "Basic Instinct", it did not receive worldwide fame, but seven "Golden Raspberries" (prizes for the worst film). But over the years, the film suddenly became a cult classic in its genre - including among film critics.

By the way, Verhoeven was the first director to come to receive the "Golden Raspberries" in person, which once again raises the question of whether he is fooling the enlightened public.

This question arose repeatedly later, when Verhoeven churned out a couple more erotic thrillers - "Her" (2016) and "Temptation" (2021), and if "Temptation" is quite traditional (erotic fantasies of a nun), then "Her" is a kind of "psychological erotic confusion" in which the main character, played by Isabelle Huppert, cannot figure out her sexual relationship with her neighbor.

She finds out that this is her neighbor already in the middle of the film, and at the beginning it is a stranger in a mask who broke into her apartment (an important detail - Juppper, when she played in the film, was over 60), beat her up and raped her. Then the rape was repeated again (that's when she tore off the mask), but the heroine did not report it to the police. The complexity of her relationship with life is explained by the fact that the heroine's father is a mass murderer who is in prison, and she may have something to do with this murder.

In the end, Verhoeven, in order to avoid annoying questions from sane viewers about what he did here, said that what was shown in the film cannot be treated as a real story. Well, and film critics, naturally, accepted the film with a bang.

At the same time, he remains (or at least was) a solid professional, which is proven, for example, by the fact that, amidst all this erotic decadence, he shot "RoboCop" in 1997 - a film that deservedly became a cult classic.

So life was a success.

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