Review by Robert Barry
Stars Martin Freeman, Eva Birthistle, Jodhi May, Emily Holmes, Toby Jones, Natalie Press, Jonathan Holmes, Michael Teigen, Kevin McNulty, Agata Buzek
Written by Peter Greenaway
Certification UK 15 | US R
Runtime 134 minutes
Directed by Peter Greenaway
Martin Freeman has a problem with the expression "god damn it". From his lips, these words always seem to sound wrong: forced, unnatural. With "fuck" he has no such problem. Throughout the considerable length of Greenaway's latest effort, in which he plays Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn rather closer to Tim from The Office than to his turn as Lord Shaftebury in the Beeb's Charles II, Freeman gives us several good fucks. But his god damns consistently give the impression of an RSC regular, shoehorned into the role of a hardboiled New York cop without a moment's preparation. One might think there was little call for repeated god damning in a film about the life of the great 17thcentury painter of Biblical scenes, but such prejudices, one can only presume, are the very stuff of which Greenaway considers it his life's work to breathlessly sweep aside.
Following the story of the tortured genesis and troubled reception of one of Rembrandt's most celebrated group portraits, The Night Watch, the narrative becomes a kind of mystery - with van Rijn in the role of detective - that seeks to unwrap one of the most puzzling and puzzled over paintings in all art history. Greenaway reads The Night Watch as an accusation of murder towards its subjects, teasing out little clues in the composition - the suggestive placing of shadows and pools of light, the clownish appearance of certain soldiers, the direction of eyelines and firing lines - to build up a picture of a military conspiracy which the painter sought to bring to light through his art. In the process of Rembrandt's investigative journey we are treated to a potted history of his sex life, financial dealings and social standing.
Greenaway is never afraid to let his camera feign as a proscenium arch. The film predominates in mid to wide shots, with occasional soliloquys delivered straight to camera in close-up. No attempt is made to disguise the fact that most of the sets have been contructed on a soundstage and stage machinery is allowed in plain sight. There is practically nothing specifically cinematic about this work, but then so, Greenaway's argument goes, is there little painterly about Rembrandt's portrait. "By its very nature," says one character of the finished Night Watch, gesturing towards its sense of arrested action, the outstretched hand's disruption of the flat painterly surface, "it denies being a painting - it is theatre." So Nightwatching denies being cinema, but in so doing becomes a self-conscious discourse on the cinema as an art of light and movement, in the manner of von Sternberg.
The problem with Nightwatching is its didacticism. It is the labour of love of an ex-art student, nostalgic for his alma mater. This is reflected most conspicuously in the use of language, freely mixing anachronistic modern slang ("bumboy", "short and curlies" &c.) with archaic formality. It gives the impression of nothing so much as a lecturer's tired attempt at louche trendiness. Despite having the use of one of the greatest painters of all time as storyboard artist, Greenaway's images lack the seductiveness of great cinema, his colours fail to meet the richness of Rembrandt's. Though the set dressing tends towards the minimal - for which we should perhaps be thankful, surely no-one wants to return to the days of the French heritage picture known as the tradition de qualité - Greenaway wont let his wealth of period research go to waste, and so simply puts it into the mouths of his characters. The murder-mystery is dispensed of in similar fashion, through lengthy expository dialogue, in the style of the bad old English thriller writers so despised by Chandler. Nightwatching thus ends up as a worthy piece of art criticism, no doubt destined to delight undergraduate lecturers more than it will satisfy the ardent cinephile.