UK Premiere

Short Synopsis:

An extravagant, exotic and moving look at Rembrandt's romantic and professional life, and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting The Night Watch.

Review:

Peter Greenaway’s first feature film since the completion of the Tulse Luper Cycle, Nightwatching continues the director’s fascination with Flemish painting. Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice, Nightwatching weaves a tale surrounding the commission and creation of Rembrandt’s most famous work, known as ‘The Nightwatch’; a tale mixing painting, theatre, politics, loss of sexual innocence and personal vanity in what eventually becomes a murder mystery. In some respects this harkens back to Greenaway’s first feature, ‘The Draughtsman’s Contract’, as through his painting Rembrandt shows the guilty natures of the work’s subjects. By exposing crimes in his painting the conspirators become determined to obtain their revenge by leading him to personal and financial ruin.

Working with Cinematographer Reinier van Brummelen, who has been his regular cinematographer since ‘8½ Women’, Greenaway has lit almost every scene as a Rembrandt painting, rich in shadows and hidden figures. In a mixed cast of British, Canadian, Dutch and Polish actors, Martin Freeman as Rembrandt, and Eva Birtwhistle, as his wife, Saskia, bring a contemporary reality to Rembrandt’s earthy home life, comparing it to the surface pomp of the painting’s subjects, which cover the grim nature of their own various crimes.

This is the first of a series of films by Greenaway entitled ‘Dutch masters’, to be followed by ‘Groltzius’.

RO