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Martin Freeman is the great artist Rembrandt van Rijn in this bizarre part drama part art lecture |
Director: Peter Greenaway
Cast: Martin Freeman (Rembrandt), Eva Birthistle (Saskia van
uylenburg), Jodhi May (Geertje Dircx), Emily Holmes (Hendrickje Stoffels), Toby
Jones (Gerard Dou), Jonathan Holmes (Ferdinand Bol), Natalie Press (Marieka),
Fiona O’Shaughnessy (Marita), Adrian Lukis (Frans Banning Cocq), Adam Kotz
(Willem van Ruytenburch), Michael Culkin (Herman Wormskerck)
There are few artists who have such a distinctive visual
style as Rembrandt van Rijn, perhaps the greatest of the Dutch masters. And
there are few filmmakers with such distinctive style as Peter Greenaway. So this
film is a sort of perfect marriage: Greenaway, the man who claims most of the
world is visually illiterate and incapable of understanding the grace and depth
of visual images (be they film or painting), taking the secret language of
Rembrandt’s paintings.
Rembrandt (Martin Freeman) is hired to paint the Militia
Company of District II. There is, however, a conspiracy in the company. Captain
Hasselberg (Andrzek Seweryn), the original commissioner of the painting, is
killed, seemingly in an accident, and replaced by Frans Banning Cocq (Adrian
Lukis) and his lickspittle deputy Willem van Ruytenburch (Adam Kotz). Rembrandt
believes the accident was in fact murder, removing Hasselberg so that the other
members of the militia can profit in a financial deal with the British
government (I won’t go into the details). Alongside this, the film also looks
at the personal life of Rembrandt and his relationship with his wife Saskia
(Eva Birthistle) and, after her death, his maids and mistresses, Geertje (Jodhi
May) and Hendrickhe Stoffels (Emily Holmes).
Peter Greenaway is a visual stylist that’s for sure. The
film takes place (apart from a few outdoor sequences in a forest) in a sort of
representative set that looks a bit like a combination of a theatre stage and
the bare framework of a Dutch interior painting. The camera frequently uses the
width of the frame to squeeze in full-body shots of its characters, and the
width and depth of the room, to try and replicate as much as possible the look
and feel of these artworks. An early discussion of colour (and how to describe
it) is illustrated by Geertje opening curtains in a representation of
Rembrandt’s bedroom, with each colour (red-yellow-blue) in turn flooding the
room from the open windows. The film looks distinctive and impressive, the
costume design is meticulously researched, and the artful framing to ape the
conventions and styles of Rembrandt’s painting is extremely well done.
What is less well done is the actual story itself, which is
largely inert and frequently dull, and takes ages to outline what is, to be
honest, a not particularly interesting conspiracy. It then intercuts this with
scenes and moments from Rembrandt’s domestic life, but never ties the two of
these together into something coherent. Too immersed in the details of the case
to be the sort of dream-cum-fantasy of previous Greenaway films like The Draughtman’s Contract, and too
preoccupied with the director’s narrative laxity to become a proper character
study or piece of investigative fiction, the film rather uncomfortably falls
between two stools becoming neither one thing or the other.
In fact, you almost sense Greenaway’s heart wasn’t really in
it, that he really wanted to make Rembrandt
J’Accuse, the companion art lecture illustrated with moments from this
film, which really goes to town on his conspiracy theory. The details of the
conspiracy (extremely hard to follow here) are at least easier to follow in Rembrandt J’Accuse, where they make a
batty but enjoyable Dan Brownish argument – even if it is based on hands being
drawn “without commitment” and elastic interpretations of visual language. To
be honest, for all that Rembrandt
J’Accuse is a bit odd – and that Peter Greenaway has an air of an ultra-pretentious
Johnny Ball in his addresses to the camera – it actually makes a far more
compelling piece of cinema than the narrative film it sits alongside.
Which is a shame because, as well as the design, there is a
lot of good stuff here, not least in the performance of Martin Freeman. Cinema
and TV’s eternal nice-guy gets to stretch himself fantastically as an electric,
compelling genius overflowing with passion, ideas, intelligence and a chippy
(frequently foul mouthed) confidence, mixed with an insatiable sex drive and nose-thumbing
defiance. Freeman really gets the sense of a complex, earthy, fiery man who
knows he is the smartest man in the room, and is extremely cocky with it – but
also has a keen sense of justice and decency. It’s about a million miles away
from Tim or Bilbo, and a big reminder that he is a hell of a performer.
Put Freeman in with the thrilling design and painterly
flourishes of the film, and you’ve got sections that are really worth watching.
Eva Birthistle is very good as his intelligent and articulate wife, as is Johdi
May as his earthy, ill-tempered, sensual lover. Nathalie Press is heart-breaking
as an illegitimate girl with a tragic life. Adrian Lukis is particularly smarmy
and vile as the head of the militia. In fact, most of the performances are
great.
It’s just the story is not. Moments of investigation are
just building into something logical and coherent when they get interrupted by
straight-to-camera addresses (very odd) from the members of the Rembrandt
household explaining their personal situations. Just as we start to get
invested in the loves of Rembrandt, we get thrown back into the dull
conspiracy. When the two overlap, neither is really served. The story frankly
isn’t interesting enough. That’s even before you have to wade through the
inevitable Greenaway penchant for
including as much full-frontal nudity as possible (Freeman and May in
particular) and graphic sex in multiple positions and orifices. I mean, I get
it, Rembrandt was a lusty guy but do we need to keep seeing it?
Nightwatching is a
bizarre oddity – a vehicle for a commanding lead performance, with an actor
cast way against type, that never decides whether it is some sort of biography
of an artist or a secret-history-expose of a conspiracy forgotten by time. As
always with conspiracy theories you suspect the obvious-but-dull is probably
the truth – Rembrandt delivered a painting that was so radically different from
the dull line-up paintings of this genre that it shook up the art world (not in
a good way) and then he fell out of fashion, didn’t have a good understanding
of money, and went bankrupt, rather than being destroyed by a shadowy Amsterdam
cabal. Greenaway is so in love with his theories – and his usual lusty and
psychological obsessions – that he ends up with something that is neither a
drama or an art lecture but somewhere in the middle with the worst aspects of
both.
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