Starring: Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth
Director: Peter Webber
Rated: PG
IF ever a film re-created its period in loving and lavish detail, it is Girl with a Pearl Earring.
It is the story of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, his work, his family, the patronage for his portraits and his painting of the masterpiece, ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’.
While the attention to the life of Vermeer in his particular time and place, Delft 1665, is based on historical fact, this story of his painting his household maid, Griet, is the invention of novelist, Tracy Chevalier.
By the time the film is over, one believes that this is what really happened.
The film is a set designer’s paradise. It is also beautifully lit. One reviewer remarked that each frame of the film could be taken separately and put in an art gallery the compositions are so elegant, the realism so real, it enhances reality, in fact it is a moving picture version of Vermeer paintings.
The same reviewer, however, was not charmed by the film itself and felt that it was like watching paint, no matter how skilfully and beautifully applied, dry.
Unfortunately, this might also be the response of an audience which has little patience with measured and slow-moving storytelling that gives the audience ample time to gaze, to appreciate and to reflect on what they are seeing.
While the film is a constant delight to the senses, it also has a great deal to communicate about art, artistic appreciation and the style of painting in the 17th century.
It is also a telling portrait of Dutch society at the time, a contrast between Calvinist rigour and Catholic colour and chaos, a hierarchical society where even middle-class snobs lorded it over their servants who were taught to know their place.
It is especially revealing on how women in service were trapped by powerful men and treated as sex objects unless they had the strength and shrewdness to escape the continual pressure and snares.
Scarlett Johansson really does look like the girl in the painting and gives an extraordinary performance which is frequently wordless, intensely introverted but communicating by presence, glances and body language. Colin Firth portrays Vermeer as a conscientious craftsman who was a serious, even stolid personality. Tom Wilkinson is his arrogant and lascivious patron.
Among the supporting cast, Judy Parfitt stands out as the stern but realistic matriarch of the family as does Essie Davis as Vermeer’s continuously pregnant wife, insecure, jealous and irascible.
A fascinating way of communicating the genius and work of a painter in his times as well as bringing the story behind a painting (even if it is fiction) to life.
