Nightwatching, Peter Greenaway's clever conspiratorial take on the creation of Rembrandt's The Night Watch, is everything fans of the director want to see.
It's bawdy, smart, mannered and shot with a texture that's inspired by and true to the subject matter. That is to say, it is framed and lit like a painting -- a metier with which the sometime artist Greenaway is intimately familiar.
It is both imaginative historical fiction (despite all its idiosyncrasies, there is no real evidence Rembrandt was trying to communicate any message of nefariousness in his world-famous commissioned portrait of the Amsterdam Civil Guard), and refreshingly human. One of the greatest painters in history is, here, portrayed by a comic actor (Martin Freeman, of Britain's The Office and A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) with little gravitas but plenty of sympathy, humour and ultimately nobility.
Indeed, the Rembrandt van Rijn we are introduced to, naked (as are many of the women in the movie at various times), is one whose life, work and appetites tend to dovetail. His sex life overlaps between his mistresses, his models (Rembrandt painted nudes with a realism unique for the time) and his agent-turned-wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle). In fact, one of the movie's real strengths is its female cast, particularly Nathalie Press as a pubescent scullery maid who inspires Rembrandt as she tremulously faces the daunting life ahead of her as a woman in that world.
This Rembrandt is a sharp-tongued social gadfly who gets away with painting against the grain of public sensibility and getting paid handsomely for it.
But fortunes change, and with the added responsibility of Saskia's pregnancy (a difficult one that adds to the drama), Rembrandt is forced to "sell out" and accept a stodgy commission that he considers beneath his talents - the Amsterdam Civil Guards portrait.
His hard-feelings toward military portraiture and the static rendition he's expected to deliver leave him predisposed to think the worst of his subjects. And luckily for the plot, they do turn out to be a bunch of power-hungry oafs and knaves, capable even of killing their own.
Mere disgust turns to dark loathing when one of the few Guards he's friendly with, Piers Hasselburg (Andrzej Seweryn) is killed in a shooting "accident." His suspicion of murder leads him to a cesspool of sexually-charged jealousy and the revelation -- via a troubled servant-girl named Marieke (Natalie Press) -- of their involvement in a brothel of painfully young indentured servants.
And with that, our historical figure turns from self-serving free spirit to rebel with a cause, letting his muse turn a standard portrait into a series of clues to all the dark goings-on -- effectively committing career suicide. In effect, the murder is Nightwatching's MacGuffin, a mere catalyst to the artist's character arc, which is richly portrayed by Freeman.
Nightwatching is, in the end, a sexually-charged work of febrile imagination and labyrinthean 17th century politics. And it succeeds in the daunting task of turning a historical icon into flesh and blood, with all the fear, lust and emotion that entails.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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