Nightwatching

Nightwatching (2007)

Highly original, deliberately false, playing loose with fact, frankly sexual, and dry and cold. And not very interesting.

It's fair to say very few people will like this movie, even among those inclined to watch it in the first place, even among fans of the director Peter Greenaway. Luckily, there will be those few who will find it so stylized, startling, offbeat, and intense as to love it. It does suggest something brilliant in the pretty murk it also is. And the actors are performing their hearts out, every one of them pushing their emotional limits within the crisp, dry set designs, which are stiff, symmetrical, and stagey. And beautiful.

There is no question this is an "art" film, highly controlled and aesthetic head to toe. The photography has a kind of studio controlled fluidity, not the moving camera of a steadicam or classic Hollywood, but a steady, slow tracking horizontally inward or sliding sideways. This helps keep the scenes alive, a little, but it also adds to the drone of the whole, since the movement is nearly always the same. In a way, the camera is in synch with the sets, which are also similar in scale and proportion throughout, and symmetrical.

What's it about? Rembrandt and his two wives and one known lover (all compressed into one invented time frame). That's not bad material for a movie, but there is also the political intrigue that Greenaway inserts, a confusing and dull affair with vain attempts to mimic (I think) the drama of the Da Vinci code (the book, not the movie). "Nightwatching" has almost a second plot which comes out of a fantastical reinterpretation of the most monumental of Rembrandt's paintings, "Nightwatch." Greenaway as both writer and director became convinced (or at least wanted to create that impression) that a conspiracy was built into the symbolism of the painting, even a murder. (A second disc in the deluxe DVD edition has a documentary exploring this.) It might have worked, but it's just poorly constructed and the writing is willfully obtuse. amidst the larger sexual and social threads of the main plot, this other idea is an intrusion.

What is missing almost completely in this 2 ¼ hour is any sense of Rembrandt the painter. His personality, his personal life, his apparent rebelliousness are all evident, but the artist, and the art, is missing. The one thing this obsession leads to is some crisp photography of the one painting, and though the shots go by too fast, it's revealing to see up close Rembrandt's rough style, which was more and more at odds with the Dutch tendency for detail (a direction Vermeer typifies a couple decades later).

For people familiar with contemporary theater, this is it on film. It looks great and has passion. But it's just not very interesting. The writing is strained, and the ideas thin. Most of all, it's indulgent. A lot of talent squandered.

Briefly, the plot of Nightwatching is about Rembrandt's uncovering of a conspiracy during his painting of his most famous work the Night Watch. Just as importantly it's about the three loves of his life.

I've tried to review this film in the context of Peter Greenaway's directing career as it's pretty critical to my appreciation. As much an artwork as any film itself, with a director who has had a long career, is how all the artworks come together as a ghost of their creator. The power of women over men is something that Greenaway has always reflected on in his films, and in that context Nightwatching represents a mellowing of his gaze. Always fascinated by women destroying men or cuckolding them in some way, Greenaway has made a film where the central character of the painter Rembrandt lives amongst women, and whilst often bewildering to him, they are companions. There are remnants of the past style at the beginning of the movie where during a family meal all the women in the room chant together, "Contemporary women are permitted to smoke, write, correspond with Descartes, wear spectacles, insult the Pope, and breast-feed babies.". The result here is charming as opposed to alarming. A far cry from "Deadman's Catch" in Drowning By Numbers (1988), a catching game where players are successively handicapped for missing catches, and finally wrapped in a winding sheet (traditionally used for corpses) when they lose. The women escape unscathed, perfect catchers, people that exist in some sort of harmony with life, who can find a place and a rhythm. In Nightwatching women still have that rhythm but they don't end up murdering their husbands! On the other hand Rembrandt does have to defend Hendrikje Stoffels from the advances of the callow and the licentious, and women, though with this rhythm are victims of men rather than succubi.

Another echo is a reference to cuckoldry, when Rembrandt discourses on how Potiphar was a cuckold who, "...slept with young men in order to avoid the temptation of his wife trying to screw Joseph". Apparently the Jewish tradition relating to Potiphar related in the Talmud, is that Potiphar bought Joseph as a catamite. Rembrandt learnt this from a rabbi friend of his, an interesting fact in a very well researched movie.

I've seen many Rembrandt drawings and paintings in museums, but I never knew that he had actually produced a small number of erotic works, which is something that Greenaway draws out in his extremely ribald Rembrandt. A fierce critic of Rembrandt, Andries Pel, who despised Rembrandt's realism, in 1681 wrote of his females nudes, "...the traces of the lacings of the corsets on the stomach, of the garters on the legs must be visible if nature was to get her due.". Rembrandt's fascination with this sort of thing is again picked up on by Greenaway.

When I went to the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam and stood in front of the Night Watch, I very much felt that the men in the painting were poseurs and dandies and that I had no interest in the painting because of this. That though was precisely Rembrandt's point, and Greenaway really helped to bring the painting and much of his other work alive. Something that Greenaway has said about this film is that Amsterdam for a time in the 1640s was a place of unregulated wealth gathering by a handful of civil dynasties, similar to modern Russia.

I felt that in line with what I'm saying about mellowing and maturity, the choice of composer Giovanni Solamar, who is far less famous than frequent collaborator Michael Nyman, follows along the same trajectory, the music is far less flashy, but somehow full of confusion and elegiac tones, more consistent with a film from an older and wiser filmmaker.

I felt that I could connect with Rembrandt's grief at the death of his wife Saskia, and that there was something quite special about that. Despite the fact that Greenaway manages to build scarce suspense around the uncovering of the treachery that Rembrandt seeks to expose, I think it's a film that I will remember forever, with several, to my mind, iconic scenes. I think it helped immensely in my taking in of the film that Martin Freeman looks so much like Rembrandt, especially with the care and attention the hairdressers heaped upon him, something that's quite critical when you have a man so famous for self-portraiture.

A good film but long, and one has to be something of an aficionado of Greenaway to enjoy this one. Beautifully lit and visually composed with an insistent Nymanesque score and a witty script this not only benefits from but demands several viewings from the Stoppard of cinema. I warmed to Martin Freeman as Rembrandt, a new actor to me, as the film went on for his combination of high art, low sex and comfortable domesticity. He was no more moral than those whose foibles he sought to expose, but he was certainly more likable. It is not really possible to follow the 33 people (and dog) in the eponymous painting and the mysteries tat Greenaway seeks to solve, which make more sense in his documentary "Rembrandt's J'Accuse" than they do in this film – both are packaged together in the DVD. I would not say this is less demanding than his recent films, though it is certainly more accessible, and his best since the scandalously unavailable "Drowning by Numbers".

Not as visually complex as 'Prosperos' Books', not as intriguing as 'Draughtsman's Contract', not as innovative as 'The Suitcases', 'Nightwatching' is however a little of everything and, of cause, more.

There are references to the earlier films, most obviously - to the 'Contract', the latest are so strong that sometimes one may think it is a deep 'remake' of that earliest Greenways' work.

While the presentation is generally easier-going then in some previous films, it does not mean loss of depth and loads of small details (for which the film deserves a HD version - something to appear, probably, in the year 2107?). Like all Greenway films, this one to be watched many times to discover new and new layers.

The historic plot is doubtful however neither naive nor unrealistic. And most likely it is just a canvas to put the ideas on: which present in numbers.

In a way, Greenaway is my touchstone for deep film experience. It was with him that I first studied the things that have since become part of every viewing experience, from "Godzilla versus the Sea Monster" to the more homeopathically transcendent meditations of Medem and Ruiz.

Each film is its own adventure, and that's part of the joy. Each film is similar in reaching for a context outside of the ordinary context of other films, so it helps if you are knowledgeable about the dynamics of those contexts. Which of those that are more natural to you will color which of his films you prefer.

I like his "book" films the best because I had prewoven worlds that he just happened to encircle. All of his looping narratives and playing with discrete objects, events and relationships strung and structured capture me when they are prominent. I'm not crazy about his projects when he drifts toward conventional narrative as he does here and away from engaging in conceptual play.

This is more like "Draughtsman's Contract" or even "Cook, Thief" than his more complex films, so many people will like it. Its also his prettiest film since he lost his long time cinematographer.

If you don't know this film, its a simple fold: its about Rembrandt creating a painting with deep, Greenaway-like meaning. The filmmaker goes to great lengths to visually make his relationship to the film be similar to Rembrandt's with the painting, and thereby fold us into the thing because we see and hear (in great detail) viewers of that painting react. And they punish our painter much like the filmmaker has been.

Threaded throughout is a rather touching story — not unique in Greenaway — of a man and passion, and the woman and then women he loves. And how passion and love, and creativity encompass one another and drive that energy of life that we count on artists to use to break mountains ahead of us so we can pass.

Its the women here. It is always the lovers who allow creativity, who grow it and channel it. There is no real penetration of life without it, and the night it brings. Just on the straight narrative alone, its powerful. It works. The whole thing works, and could be a theatrical success for a wider audience than usual.

The three lovers are redheads, of course.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.