Nightwatching

X-posted with OrsonsWell.com.

Neo-classical avant-gardist Peter Greenaway returns to indie cinemas near you with Nightwatching, a boisterous and beguiling film straight out of cinema’s academic leftfield. Cut from the same canvas as The Draughtsman’s Contract, Nightwatching sees Greenaway again throw himself into artsy period restoration, this time in chase of answers to the legend that is Rembrandt. The themes of painter as outsider and of cinema as artifice are never far from the camera’s lens, and while onscreen events fail to reprise the full pomp of Greenaway’s yore, Nightwatching certainly proves an edifying spectacle in the current atmosphere of Avatars and Wolfmen.

The film’s beating heart is Rembrandt himself, a painter as technically brilliant as he is historically elusive. For all the acclaim this famed Dutch Master continues to receive in art schools, little is known about his life. Of the three women he took during his lifetime, for example, where the second two came from is anybody’s guess. And then there’s his finances. Rembrandt famously died destitute having once lived handsomely, though just where all the money went remains a mystery.

Nightwatching tries to playfully plug these holes by spinning off from the many strange events detailed in ‘The Night Watch’, one of Rembrandt’s most famous, enigmatic, and downright peculiar pieces of work. Classically stunning yet brimming with caricature, Greenaway postulates that the painting accuses its own characters of murder. His conclusion? The men sent up on canvas got their revenge in real life by socially crippling Rembrandt, and then taking his sight. So Nightwatching is a kind of CSI for the Renaissance.

Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office – these brackets will plague his career) is the slightly odd choice to play the painter. You sense someone in a suit was behind his casting, but they got it wrong. For the first hour – the hour that matters to people in suits – it’s almost impossible to give Freeman credence in the role. A small man who jumps around a lot, Freeman comes across as a perennially frustrated Jack Russell; you’re always half expecting his Rembrandt to either turn to the camera and decry everything as “a bit gay” or hump a nearby pillow. Yet as the film passes into its second hour, an unexpected dignity attaches itself to the portrayal, not least because Freeman unflinchingly plays his Dutch Master more fetid than fêted. (And frequently without any clothes on, too.)

That second hour turns out to be far more captivating than the first. To begin with, Nightwatching is disappointingly stolid. There are simply too many characters to grapple with here, and Rembrandt is shown as too ferocious a negotiator, for it to be otherwise. Sure, Greenaway’s artfully composed, slow-moving frames are enough to hook your attention for a while, but the airy poise that made The Draughtsman’s Contract so enjoyable is palpably lacking. That all changes once the master painter is seen to actually pick up a brush in anger – though it must be said the men in suits have long left the cinema by the time he does.

Nightwatching is, ultimately, an extended lecture on the ontology of art dressed up in the plumes and ruffles of a Renaissance narrative. Like all good lectures, it flirts with tedium while loyally covering its ground before providing the payoff in terms of answers: pure, simple and unexpected. Stick with Nightwatching to the end and you get to enjoy both an imaginative retelling of one of the most important paintings in art history and a repositioning of the art of painting itself. Way back in the 17th Century, you see, Rembrandt was not just painting a picture; he was using all the tricks he knew to realistically present a moment of captured life, watermarked with meaning. The master painter with brush in hand, was, in effect, predating theatre and the cinema as he worked.

An interesting thought, given the giant blue smurfs currently assailing our screens.