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GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
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Johannes (Jan) Vermeer (pronounced Fair-mare, not Vurr-meer), is an enigma. Married at 21, he died at 43 the father of 15 children (4 died young, 11 survived) and only 35 paintings. His entire oeuvre (you can see it at http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/vermeer/thumb.html) would fit on a single roll of 35 mm film, and could have been shot in ten minutes with a motor drive. In his limpid gentle domestic scenes, we see everything … and we know nothing.
From outside a quiet street,
we pass into a domestic interior where a maid pours milk,
a woman admires her necklace,
then reads it,
and writes a response.
From these bonsais of image, the temptation to write a story is irresistible … or so it must have seemed a good idea to author Tracy Chevalier (Oberlin '85, English, eight years after the Boss, Oberlin '77, Art History), who wrote a bestseller that in turn was made into this exquisitely lush, excruciatingly slow production. There are the wisps of motionless plot built on immobile emotive tropes: naturally the girl Griet (Scarlett Johansson, GHOST WORLD, LOST IN TRANSLATION) is the blushing reflective focus of venal patron van Ruijven (a shaded scheming Tom Wilkinson, THE FULL MONTY, IN THE BEDROOM), cow-eyed butcher-boy (Cillian Murphy, COLD MOUNTAIN), and most significantly, intense taciturn painter Vermeer (Colin Firth, VALMONT, FEVER PITCH).
As Griet concentrates men's desires, she is also the magnifying scapegoat of women's envy from wife Catharina (Essie Davis, the movie's best acting in its complexity), mother-in-law Maria Thins (Judy Parfitt, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN among other British Rep), and chambermaid Cornelia (Alakina Mann).
No matter how mundane and psychologically predictable the story (including a symbolic deflowering that Vermeer administers to Griet's virgin earlobe), no matter how many Indiglo moments (and there were many), no matter how limited Johansson's range (she simply cannot act), there remains the luscious, mesmerizing beauty of Vermeer's light as brilliantly captured in the lens of cinematographer Eduardo Serra (WINGS OF THE DOVE) – and the eerie spiritual coincidence that, with only the slightest of lip moistening, Scarlett Johansson could indeed pass for Vermeer's miraculous model. She has hung in our guest bedroom for 22 years, still an enigma of purity. If this film revealed nothing more than we knew before, it nevertheless gave us an excuse once again to gaze upon her (http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/vermeer/xce.jpg).