“It really is very conventional and straightforward film for Peter Greenaway,” explains Martin Freeman who plays Rembrandt in the famed British director’s latest outing. Nightwatching. “But I was very flattered when I was offered the part. There aren’t many Greenaway’ s in this world making films for the reasons that he makes films.”
Indeed, this rather delicious film tells the story behind one of the painter’s most famous masterpieces that although not one of his finest, daringly presents a group of soldiers not in traditional static pose but as a cacophony of action and innuendo. Of course the painting begs many a question and as such the director, who formerly helmed The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Thief, The Cook, His Wife and Her Lover, rolls up his sleeves and, like a doc performing a Caesarean, pulls out his child a kicking and a screaming.
At the start, successful artist Rembrandt is married to Saskia (Eva Birthistle) and as she is pregnant, accepts a commission to paint the Amsterdam Civil Guard, led by Capt. Frans Banning Cocq (Adrian Lukis). Subsequently after one of their number, Piers Hasselburg (Andrzej Seweryn), is accidentally killed; Rembrandt discovers more and more about the dissolute band he’s painting and suspects foul play. Further enquiry uncovers that Banning Cocq is “hopelessly in love” with co-conspirator Willem van Ruytenburgh (Adam Kotz) and that the orphanage under the Guard’s protection has been turned into a child brothel. Consequently, Rembrandt uses his painting as a cipher that offers such covert censure of his patrons, that on it’s unveiling, they throw a complete and utter wobbler. Of course this would explain, one of the great riddles in the history of painting i.e. just how Rembrandt went from being an extremely successful painter to penury almost over night. And as s is his wont, Greenaway dives into the intrigue lock, stock and barrel but in effect said conspiracy plays second fiddle to the director’s depiction of artist himself who beautifully realised by Freeman is a bawdy, lusty outspoken triumph of a man who at one point says, “What if the Virgin Mary wasn’t a virgin at all an error and that the mistake was down to an error in that translation from Hebrew to Latin?”
“ The good thing about playing Rembrandt is that no one knew what he was like,” chuckles Freeman. “It was an open brief. Okay we know what he looks like as he did so many self portraits and that was my main research but no one really knows what he was like which gives you the opportunity to make shit up. Peter’s view of Rembrandt was of a businessman keeping a household together while I portrayed him as a bit of a chap.”
“But, working with Peter is like working with a professor of painting,” adds Freeman. “He knows everything about Rembrandt. But he is also not only concerned with what he can make up and what is visually interesting. I asked him how much of this intrigue is true and he said, ‘No of course not I just made it all up!’ But most interestingly, he likened Rembrandt to the first ever lighting cameraman as it was during Rembrandt’s lifetime that domestic candle became affordable for the so, for the first time you could have artificial light, and that was what Rembrandt was all about – shadows and light- which is what film per se is also all about. I liked that.”
Nightwatching is released from Friday 26th March at the ICA and key cities.
