France, Germany, the Netherlands, 1999
Directed by Charles Matton
With Klaus-Maria Brandauer (Rembrandt van Rijn), Johanna ter Steege (Saskia Uylenburgh), Caroline van Houten (Geertje Dircx), Romane Bohringer (Hendrickje Stoffels), Jean-Philippe Ecoffey (Jan Six), Jean Rochefort (Nicolaes Tulp), Franck de la Personne (Hendrick Uylenburgh), Richard Bohringer (the preacher)
Fuming, pacing his studio, kicking his tools, and above all yelling, raving, insulting, the old, sick painter cuts a terrifying embittered figure. When he eventually sits and calms down, he angrily considers what failed and disappointed in his life, haunted by a woman he lost too quickly, hurt by the disgrace he has suffered.
Like director Jos Stelling’s 1977 film “Rembrandt fecit 1669”, the biographical picture of visual artist, writer, and filmmaker Charles Matton is built as a long flashback covering only parts of the painter’s life. Moving back and forth between the ups and downs of his past and his current, unhappy, impoverished, depressing life, the narrative relates the long years spent in Amsterdam, from the moment he arrived as a brash young man whose skills are already widely acknowledged and appreciated, at the invitation of art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh, till the bitter years when, after tirelessly painted countless works that included immediately celebrated masterpieces, loved passionately three women, and attracted the attention of the rigid Protestant elite of his country and then their ire and punishment, he has been robbed of his works and wealth, has lost nearly everybody he loved save for his daughter, and is watching his body failing him.
This episodic exploration of what could have been genuinely and solidly brilliant career and blissful life if it were not for his irreverent mind, his senseless profligacy, his stubborn streak, but also fatality, the constant threat posed by bad hygiene and contagious diseases like plague, the vicious pressure of social and religious conventions and rules, mainly focuses on two strands. The film, even more clearly than other biopics about the painter, like Alexander Korda’s 1936 film with the same simple title, “Rembrandt”, or much later the odd artistic effort crafted by Peter Greenaway in 2007, “Night Watching”, depicts in the most vivid and romantic terms Rembrandt’s love affairs while emphasizing his complex and increasingly fraught and violent relations with the aristocracy of Amsterdam.
The first element benefits from remarkable performances set each time in specific and ingeniously imagined and shot atmospheres. Matton’s Saskia Uylenburgh, the great love the old Rembrandt van Rijn keeps mourning, the niece of Hendrick Uylenburgh, is cheerfully mischievous and ardent, an endearing strong, lively, provocative character enjoying as much as his raucous and reckless husband life, fully aware of what his mad profligacy could cause but unwilling to spoil the constant party he thinks their married life can be. Her motherhood is unfortunately an excruciating experience, as many of her children, save a son, die very young. She would herself have her vibrant life cut short by illness. But before that she is shot, as well as her man, in a bright palette of colors, as the cinematography and the mise en scène eagerly convey merriness.
Relations with maid Geertje Dircx is handled in more sober terms, fitting the mature, discreet nature of the woman who has been looking for the beloved son of the painter even before Saskia’s death. It is only dealt with briefly, more touched upon than delved into, but the bitter end of their affair is captured by a striking scene of anger, where flames ravaging a canvas deliver a chiaroscuro intensely reflecting the fight between the light she thought her romance was and she needed so dearly and the shadow where the new passion of her lover and master has been relegating her relentlessly though discreetly.
With maid Hendrickje Stoffels the film puts back on the center stage a strong female character, even it at first sight she is too modest, too young, too much of lower-class nonentity to evoke Saskia. Bright lights and feisty moods do not really define the relation, mainly because the affair takes place as Rembrandt’s dealings with the elite are reaching a low point which is also a tragic point of no return. She starts a couple’s life with him right at the moment when the odds of fate are clearly against him, and in fact the illegal relations of Rembrandt and his maid hasten his fall. But she would be a devoted and bold defender of her man and his work, a tigress even, but also a much delicate and tender figure the aging artist needed. Alas, like Saskia, her life was to be short, way too short. The personal life of Rembrandt, as the initial anger pointed, is a heartbreaking string of love affairs fate deviously kept from blooming fully and lasting happily.
Framing the life in Amsterdam of Rembrandt is striking public encounters with a kind of fire and brimstone preacher. The fiery character is quick at the beginning to notice the newcomer and to guess his trade and gives him a kind warning; at the end, taken forcibly away by guards, he excitingly reminds the old man of his warning – and how relevant it was. The blind unable to see the power of art and the truth it expresses have brought much pain to the painter from the apex of power where they stand. This take on Rembrandt’s life is a stinging criticism of a wealthy and righteous elite who does not brook independence of spirit, brilliancy of talent, profligacy, and of course promiscuity.
Even if Rembrandt starts to thrive under the wing of a typical member of the elite, Jan Six, who would try to put up with his eccentric ways and to give a helping hand as long as it is socially admissible, he soon becomes a source of gossip and disapproval. He ends up being the target of the intolerant and unforgiving worldview of a scholar whom he famously painted and who becomes a key political leader in the city, Nicolaes Tulp (the man assertively dominating the right half of the 1632 painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp”). This elite is somberly cast as a narrow circle of darkly dressed and austere people sliding on the floors of sparse but luxurious rooms or occasionally austere but awesome palaces. They have nothing of the feisty spontaneity of the people around Rembrandt but look like a distinguished but stilted cast of a play confined to a small stage. No roaring life animates their world: this is just the showcase of a self-righteous and self-conscious social standard. It is a cold world quick to cheat and to crush whoever is deemed unfit to self-serving conventions and casting a long, horrific shadow on the painter’s last years.
The film leaves little room for self-analysis or detailed observation of an art in the making. Matton does not attempt to shed much light on Rembrandt’s skills and inspiration. He wants mainly to depict the increasingly frustrating battles the painter must wage against fate, too eager to take away the loved ones, and society, too impatient to shackle his anarchic personality. And Matton does it with a fine visual flair, his carefully designed and shot movie benefiting from a solid and earnest performance of actor Klaus-Maria Brandauer.