NIGHTWATCHING
Written and directed
by Peter Greenaway
Starring Martin Freeman
Classification: 18A
***
If it came from a more commercial filmmaker, Nightwatching could be marketed as a cross between Shakespeare in Love and The Da Vinci Code, combining a lusty, down-to-earth portrait of a great artist and a secret meaning behind a famous painting. But Peter Greenaway, the English director of such lush and strange films as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and The Pillow Book, is nobody's idea of a commercial director. His fans will appreciate this eccentric exercise in hypothetical art history.
Nightwatching is about the history of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn's painting The Night Watch, completed in 1642. Replete with beautifully lit theatrical tableaux, the production design (especially the famous chiaroscuro of Rembrandt's paintings) and Wlodzimierz Pawlik's baroque-sounding score feel like the real stars of the film, as they bring the painter's world to the screen. In a somewhat secondary role is English comic actor Martin Freeman ( The Office), who plays a sort of rumpled Cockney version of Rembrandt.
Depicted as a savvy but abrasive rural miller's son, Freeman's Rembrandt often speaks directly to the camera, pronouncing on everything from the 17th-century political climate to the era's pricing system for commissioned portraits. The depictions of his domestic and professional difficulties serve as bridges between the film's tableaux.
Like a modern filmmaker, Rembrandt is shown as a painter who casts and dramatizes his paintings, striding about his studio, placating and inspiring his subjects, while dealing with various financial stresses. You almost expect him to call out: "Lights, action - paint!"
The story focuses, though, on a painting that was commissioned by the Amsterdam Civil Guard and is now the showpiece of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. Famous for its size, dramatic use of light and shadow, and introduction of dynamic movement into the traditional static group portrait, The Night Watch also has a number of puzzling elements, including the presence among the soldiers of an adolescent girl, who is carrying various symbols of the militia group.
The title is considered inaccurate; a layer of dark varnish, removed in the 1940s, had left the mistaken impression that it was a night picture. But for Greenaway's purpose, the darkness - the famous Rembrandt black - is a central metaphor. As he sees it, Rembrandt gazed into the abysmal darkness that surrounded Amsterdam's golden age. In repeated scenes, the painter goes to the roof of his house to stare at the night sky. One night, he meets an adolescent girl, Marieke (Nathalie Press), an orphan who wanders the city's rooftops like a mysterious angel.
After his wife becomes pregnant, Rembrandt reluctantly takes the Guard's commission to paint their group portrait. They are depicted as fat-cat merchants and aristocrats who like to play soldier. As he begins to work on the nine-month-long project, though, Rembrandt also begins to uncover a series of scandals about his subjects: There appears to be a murder cover-up; as well, he learns that the orphanage, under the Guard's care, is actually a child brothel.
Eventually, he uses the painting to condemn his powerful subjects' vices. When the work is completed, the subjects are furious. But they accept the painting - lest by rejecting it they confirm his accusations - and plot their revenge.
Nightwatching also depicts Rembrandt's domestic life, including the three women with whom he had relations. These include his wife, Saskia Uylenburgh Eva Birthistle), who died of consumption; his son's caregiver, the lusty Geertje (Jodhi May); and finally a much younger maid, Hendrickje Stoeffels (Emily Holmes). The three actresses lend some welcome human warmth to the puzzle-box of the plot.
Greenaway appears to take his conspiracy theory about the painting seriously - he outlined it in a documentary last year called Rembrandt's j'accuse - but viewers aren't required to buy in to enjoy the film. And if Greenaway's thesis seems as cockamamie as any of Dan Brown's fictional conjectures about the Last Supper, his aim is higher.
The idea that a particular image is the product of a collision of forces, from the artist's libido to the political atmosphere of the time, adds to, rather than reduces, the work's meaning.
Liam Lacey