Review of Nightwatching (2007) by Kirsten M — 24 Mar 2010

The analysis of "The Night Watch" itself is a fascinating and learned art history lesson a la Dan Brown, only, y'know, with facts, and the director's eye for pageantry remains undimmed: every image is framed and lit in the manner of a period-appropriate canvas, and there's another run-out for that mobile curtained bed that made its debut in Greenaway's "The Baby of Macon".

The problem is that the events taking place centre-frame are all too familiar: it's the effusive, cursing artist (choice Rembrandtian dialogue: "F*** off, you f**king queer fat Polish c***!") pitted against the rotten, repressed Establishment.

Greenaway remains more interested in his characters' bodies than their souls: you see more of the swinging Freeman ballsack than anyone (possibly even Mrs. Freeman) really needs to... This perspective leads Greenaway to treat his actors as props, to be directed as one would, say, a bowl of fruit.

Certain broader scenes are pure pantomime, and poor Natalie Press has an especially hard time of it playing a ten-year-old girl. It's Freeman, rapidly becoming the patron saint of conceptually batty British cinema, who (just about) holds "Nightwatching" together, with his puckish and sporadically moving reading of Rembrandt the man - a piece of casting as unlikely yet winning as Greenaway's deployment of Jim Davidson as the zookeeper in "A Zed and Two Noughts".

A typically contrary and uncompromising work, it compels you to watch - often in spite of itself.