In her last three major films, it has been 19-year-old Scarlett Johansson’s destiny to evoke menopausal longing in older men, and what’s not to long for? Billy Bob Thornton was obsessed by her in the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There; Bill Murray was entranced by her in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Now it is the turn of Colin Firth, playing a stubbled, romantic-looking Johannes Vermeer, in this speculative imagining of the 17th-century Dutch artist’s relationship with his unknown model, to be captivated by the bloom of her untouched loveliness.
Even when she was in the 2002 horror movie Eight Legged Freaks, come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I remember seeing some of the older male giant monster-spiders looking at Scarlett piningly, exchanging shy smiles with her, before scuttling off home to contemplate the desolate reality of their monster-spider marriages and careers.
Be that as it may, Girl with a Pearl Earring — taken from the Tracy Chevalier novel — is a stunningly designed piece of work, with hauntingly beautiful cinematography from Eduardo Serra of the sort that often gets called ”painterly” and here really deserves it. This film is a tremendously intelligent and detailed homage. The production design by Ben van Os is outstanding. Films about artists don’t have to look like their art, of course; that can look self-satisfied and obtuse — like the clever, but faintly redundant pastiche sequences in Julie Taymor’s Frida — and to be frank, the sheer mass of controlled visual detail sometimes threatens to refrigerate and paralyse the movie. There were times, in fact, when I wondered what a movie about Vermeer’s life that wasn’t trying to imitate his art would look like. Exactly the same, maybe? Can the detail of his paintings be used as primary, real-world source material?
It is into this gilt frame, at any rate, that Scarlett Johansson daintily steps, playing Griet, a girl from a dignified but impoverished Protestant family, forced to take a post as domestic help to the Catholic Vermeer household in the prosperous town of Delft. ”Keep clear of their Catholic prayers!” hisses her mother before Griet sets off. ”Stop your ears!” She conceals her gorgeous hair within a modest traditional Dutch headdress, and does her best to fit in as a servant in a house full of dominant women.
Essie Davis is Vermeer’s highly strung, perpetually pregnant wife Catharina; Judy Parfitt is his formidable clay-pipe-smoking mother-in-law Maria Thins, and Joanna Scanlan gives a tough performance as Tanneke, the raw-boned serving woman who is the nearest thing Griet has to a friend.
Colin Firth, as Vermeer, must reconcile the domestic calm of the painter’s family life with the life-force romantic-artist image that the director has evidently decided should be his look. He’s the sort of long-haired, moody, intense-eyed guy who looks like he should be roistering around town and painting can-can dancers, but actually stays in en famille, reading and drinking contemplative mugs of beer while small children scramble on and off his lap — everything but watch television.
Webber’s masterstroke is the use of Vermeer’s eerie, empty studio, familiar from so many paintings, but here untenanted except for the uncanny, robot-like wooden life model and, in one scene, the camera obscura device that is Vermeer’s link with the modern world of image. Griet impresses Vermeer with her intuitive sense of light and colour and he is soon infatuated enough to want to paint her in secret.
But the movie is more complicated than just being about erotic obsession sublimated into artistic rapture. This painting has been privately commissioned for Vermeer’s wealthy patron, Van Ruijven — a lip-smacking performance from Tom Wilkinson. He has conceived a goatish desire for Griet, and the financially straitened Vermeer is ambiguously complicit.
Webber gives a long, long close-up on Johansson’s face as she models for that famous portrait study and the effect really is swooningly beautiful, though a little coercive — as if we were being ordered to swoon. Often, Firth and Johansson will gaze at each other, silent, stricken, but it may be just that a sense that any dialogue at all is too crude an intrusion into this visual splendour. Girl with a Pearl Earring at times surrounds itself with an art-gallery hush, but it is just so ambitious, and intriguing, and beautiful, you will find yourself immobile in front of its canvas, drinking in the details. — Â