REMBRANDT LAUGHING
For all his mastery and originality as a maverick independent, Jost has often alienated audiences with the harshness of his themes and the apparent distance from which he views his subjects and his characters. A 60s radical who spent over two years in federal prison for draft resistance, he has lived without a fixed address for most of his 26-year career as a filmmaker, and the alienation as well as the clarity stemming from his wanderlust has seeped into many of his fiction features. These have often centered on isolated individuals: a private detective in Angel City (1977), a drifter out of work in Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), a drug dealer in Chameleon (1978), a Vietnam vet in Bell Diamond (1987). (Even the two people who form the focus of the 1983 Slow Moves register more as lonely individuals than as a couple.)
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Although the first and last scenes in Rembrandt Laughing are symmetrically structured and juxtaposed–both depict early morning visits of Martin (English) to Claire (Barbara Hammes), a woman he used to live with–there’s a random drift to many of the intervening sequences; they tend to focus more on everyday activities of various characters than on dramatic events. A few significant incidents do occur in these sequences–Martin’s friend Daniel (Dorsky), who is also a former lover of Claire’s, asks Martin to be the executor of his will; another character suddenly breaks into tears while looking at the San Francisco Bay with Claire, because her husband left her–but most of the time the characters are simply working or spending time together: telling stories, serving and eating food, sharing memories.
A week later we see Claire at work again, and Martin trying out for a job as an “explainer” to kids on tours at a San Francisco science museum called the Exploratorium. After running through his carefully prepared spiel, which ends with the line “I can explain everything,” Martin expresses concern to his potential employer about the implied hubris of that claim. The next day Martin prepares to compose some music on his synthesizer; he listens to Beethoven’s 15th Quartet in A Minor on earphones–a piece that is often heard again, becoming a motif rather like the Rembrandt etching and lending a sense of gravity to other events.
What may seem initially off-putting about the film is the degree to which portions of the story appear to be self-consciously “thought up” rather than discovered. As a storyteller, Jost has often shown a certain awkwardness in ordering events and controlling exposition–in striking contrast to his consummate command and skills as a cinematographer and sound recorder. But as Rembrandt Laughing suggests, the usual motives and satisfactions of story telling don’t interest him very much; he uses plot, well or badly, as a vehicle for arriving at something else–in this case the poetry and textures of everyday life. Implicit in the film’s moving final synthesis, and much closer to metaphor and poetry than to story and prose, is the realization that water, sand, ashes, pebbles, people, bicycling, ice-skating, and even fixing breakfast are much closer to being the same things than we ordinarily choose to suppose. I realize that this concept, as it’s baldly and awkwardly expressed here, may not make too much sense as prose; but go and see what Jost does with it cinematographically in Rembrandt Laughing, and you’ll get a much better idea of what I mean.
