Girl With a Pearl Earring


by Shari L. Rosenblum

You will outlive me, artful girl,
and with averted head will rest your moment's glance
on centuries of devotees (barring mischance),
the light in your eyes like the light on your pearl.
--John Updike, from Head of a Girl, at the Met

There is a quiet vitality to Peter Webber's Girl With a Pearl Earring, where cinematic nuance is conveyed in a painterly pastiche of graceful shadows and vibrant color. Taking inspiration from Tracy Chevalier's best selling novel, as well as from Vermeer's turbaned girl for whom it was named, Webber's adaptation unfolds as if in the darkened background of the famous “troine” – a whispered backstory of the subject's path to the artist's canvas. Fleshing out the invented image from Chevalier's imagination, Olivia Hetreed's delicate screenplay, Ben Van Os' production design and Eduardo Serra's masterful cinematography cast shimmers of light on the angles softly suggested in the strokes of the artist's brush. Like the painting itself, Girl With a Pearl Earring traces the sublimated sensuality between the seer and the seen – the longing in the long exchanged look.

Scarlett Johansson plays Griet, a 16-year-old girl in 17th-century Holland, who comes to work as a maid in the home of Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth), and who will eventually serve as the model for the title canvas. The painter seems to watch with us as Griet finds her footing amid the noise and activity of the Vermeer household, and learns to navigate the spaces left to her among the great brood of children and servants who answer to his ever-pregnant wife (Essie Davis) and mother-in-law (Judy Parfitt). It is a world unlike the one she's known, but Griet is in equal part reserved and self-assured, and reveals this double essence with a flash of her eyes: Even when lowered in deference, they dance with heightened perception. Johansson's performance is sublimely understated here. She brings Griet to textured life with the subtlety of her posture, the restrained musculature of her face, and the subdued excitement that propels her movements. She makes herself of another time, and comes to resemble the face that hangs in the Hague in ways the young girls she plays in Lost in Translation or Ghostworld do not.

Griet watches, too. She watches the painter shut out the world, reshift the light, and invent shades of vision in his study above the bustling reality below him. As Griet watches him, she comes to see the detail that he does, and to decipher the differences in his recreations of the real; and he comes to see that she sees. They are bound together in an intimacy of perspective that the film allows us to spy upon, to share.

Firth plays Vermeer as brooding and resigned – with senses sparked only by the intricacies that pass for simple surface – like the colors that play in a whited cloud, a blue that exists outside of nature, or the multi-glistened milkshades of a virginal pearl in blood-pinked skin. Though not quite given to the period drama, his Vermeer is persuasively passionate in his discoveries and deftly tentative in his steps outside convention.

When the maid finally does sit for the artist, still so proper, the moment pulsates with sexual rhythm – repressed, but irrepressible nonetheless. The wetted mouth, the parted lips, the freshly tweaked skin of the bejeweled ear invoke, invite, inspire – and her desire for him is recreated through his for her. They connect as if in a meditation on seduction – in art, by art. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is a stunningly beautiful work – but it does have its flaws. Its villains take on cartoonish features, deeply contrasted with the naturalist tenor of its heroes. Judy Parfitt plays the mercenary matriarch with more vigor than is called for, and Tom Wilkinson (In the Bedroom) as the lecherous patron of Vermeer who lusts after Griet, seems a take-off on Snidely Whiplash. There are anachronisms, too, not least of which is Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later), as the feasible love interest for Griet, who never seems to make it quite fittingly into the year 1665.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is a convincing journey through the silenced emotions and social mores of a time preserved now only in libraries and museums – but that resonate with truths still modern, timeless as the moment captured in the frame – looking out upon us, and knowing what we want to see.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene