Peter Greenaway gets to the bottom of a murder mystery in REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE (Courtesy of ContentFilm International)
REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE (Peter Greenaway, 2009)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Opens Wednesday, October 21
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.petergreenaway.com
In 1974, Orson Welles released F FOR FAKE, a playful documentary about art forgers in which the iconoclastic director often showed up on-screen, tongue in cheek, leading viewers through a tantalizing tale that might or might not actually be true. Controversial filmmaker and painter Peter Greenaway (THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT; THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER) continues his own cinematic foray into the art world with REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE, a follow-up to his 2007 film, NIGHTWATCHING, which took viewers behind the scenes of the creation of Rembrandt’s 1624 masterpiece “The Night Watch.” (Greeenaway has also completed projects about Veronese’s “The Wedding at Cana” and Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” with Picasso, Seurat, Monet, and others on deck.) Like Welles, Greenaway appears throughout REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE, his white-haired head seen in a small box near the center-bottom of the screen as he lays out his theory about how “The Night Watch” is actually an elaborately detailed drama about a real murder that took place at the time, with Rembrandt pointing out the killer. Through extreme close-ups of the painting and re-creations of scenes involving such characters as Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia Uylenburgh (Eva Birthistle), the servants Geertje Dirks (Jodhi May) and Hendrickje Stoffels (Emily Holmes), and Rembrandt himself (Martin Freeman), Greenaway goes over every aspect of the canvas as if he is a forensics expert, dividing the film into thirty-five sections, or clues, that all support his thesis. Along the way, he comments on art history and Dutch society, creating a surprisingly thrilling film that works on several levels. But most of all, it is a lot of fun — no matter how much of it might be true.