But Girl With a Pearl Earring makes a strong case both for the painting and the artist himself. It caused me to think about the painting in a way I never have, and when it's finally shown, to truly appreciate its profound beauty, even if the fictional events portrayed in the film likely bear little relation to how the painting actually got made. Scarlett Johanssen plays Griet, the imagined girl of the painting, whose real name has been lost to history. She's hired as a maid to the cluttered Vermeer household, circa 1650-something, in the Dutch town of Delft. The film imagines her as the daughter of a painter fallen on hard times, so when she finally meets the brooding, intense master artist, played as expected by Colin Firth, there's an immediate kinship. She understands him and his work and vision in a way his neurotic wife never could. It doesn't hurt that she's a luscious little Dutch tulip ripe for the plucking. There's little dialogue in the film – Griet probably has less than 10 full lines – but it never feels slow or pointless. There's story aplenty that puts the passive but clearly soulful Griet at the center of, not a love triangle, more like a love Venn Diagram. Vermeer wants her but loves his constantly babied-up wife. Griet is drawn to Vermeer but threatened with a right good raping by Vermeer's patron, played with lascivious relish by Tom Wilkinson. And Griet has feelings for a butcher's son (28 Days Later's Cillian Murphy), but secretly longs for the artistic life which she knows she'll never have. But GWAPE is really a film about images, color and textures, and as such it's beautiful. Every shot could itself be a Vermeer painting, and the daily grind of pre-indoor plumbing life is so richly portrayed it almost looks tolerable in a shabby-chic kinda way. Ultimately, though, both Vermeer and Griet are trapped by their respective societal roles, and as romantic as it would be to see them traipse off through the sewage-plugged canals of Delft, that simply isn't allowed, as you well know from countless Merchant/Ivory films. Thankfully, GWAPE doesn't fall victim to the overbearing sentimental goop of too many Merchant/Ivory joints, and instead simply tells us how the painting came to be, or at least how the novelist who wrote the book it's based on thought it happened. And Johanssen looks shockingly similar to the girl in the painting, though like most high-toned beetches, she never shows her zoobs, which is truly unfortunate. I suppose I'll have to content myself with the porn spinoff, Girl With a Pearl Necklace.
Review by |