Nightwatching (2007, Canada/France/Germany/Poland/Netherlands/UK/whew)

There are certain directors whose work, at least for me, requires a shift in perspective at the outset. John Waters is a good example – unless I’ve been on a streak, it takes me a good five to ten minutes of run time to turn my head around to his worldview, since his style of filmmaking breaks from the common so dramatically. Peter Greenaway is another obvious choice, and I haven’t seen a new film of his since . . . wow, I’m not sure. The Pillow Book was twelve years ago, I still haven’t seen 8 ½ Women, and the Tulse Luper films never got a real release in the States.

In any case, Nightwatching is only the second Greenaway that I’ve seen in the theater, after a revival of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. (Please, DVD gods. Please.) I think his films are best served theatrically – partly because of the, well, theatricality that most of them express, but also because of the color, and the attention to detail. Nightwatching is a perfect example – a greatly elaborated and free-form biopic of Rembrandt’s life before, during and after the painting of The Night Watch, and his relationships with four very different women, the film is crammed with detail. Greenaway not only takes advantage of his subject matter by incorporating extreme chiaroscuro into his visual style, he also litters the screen with the hallmarks of Northern Renaissance still-life and figural painting – a better art historian than I could pick apart almost every sequence, telling you why that wine glass is placed there, this bunch of grapes here.

This latent subject matter turns naturally into some of the larger themes of Nightwatching - the intersections of art and commerce (or, more specifically, art as commerce), social conformity and the creative life, and the dangers a comfortable living might pose a figure such as Rembrandt. As with most of Greenaway’s work, Nightwatching is almost impossibly dense, visually as well as textually. The dialog constantly refers to minutia of Dutch society in the fifteenth century, and can be maddening at times for this very reason. But the actors pull it off with a contemporary straightforwardness – no “thous” here. Martin Freeman (Tim from the British version of The Office) is a surprisingly strong protagonist, and he’s matched well by his female counterparts – Eva Birthistle as his capitalist wife, Saskia, Emily Holmes as the housemaid, Hendrickje (a favorite of mine), Natalie Press as the muse Marieke (if you haven’t seen My Summer of Love, please do so now), and Johdi May as the artist's mistress, Geertje. But, as usual in a Greenaway film, the acting takes second place to the stage itself, and all of the canny things that the filmmaker shows, rather than tells. It may require a shift of senses to really get into Nightwatching, but it’s not without its unique rewards.