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Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

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From Time Out Film Guide

Delft, 1665. While Griet (Johansson) is well aware of her place in the Vermeer household, her menial station actually allows access to the master's studio, an access denied to both his wife and her mother. Vermeer (Firth) is soon impressed by the new servant's intuitive understanding of light and composition, as well as by her pale complexion and bee-stung lips. Inspired by Vermeer's paintings, cinematographer Eduardo Serra fashions a mise-en-scène of delicately illumined portraits jostling with everyday clutter. Controlled, patient and precise, the results are somewhat claustrophobically beautiful. Director Webber is careful to note the tight reins binding this society: a Puritanism which insists, for example, that women keep their heads covered, and the unsentimental economic imperatives which lead Vermeer's mother-in-law (Parfitt) to facilitate the deception of her daughter in an illicit portrait of Griet. Dialogue is sparse in this film of narrow looks and scowls. You may yearn for the characters to break free, but the movie feels shakiest when it brushes with melodrama. If it lacks the emotional pitch of Tracy Chevalier's novel, it gives us light, colour, shading; a very fine score by Alexandre Desplat; and confirms Johansson as the most acute and watchful of actresses.

Author: TCh

Time Out Film Guide

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No one mentioned atiisrtc said...

Posted on Mar 31 2012 06:55 No one mentioned atiisrtc license...how the artist makes choices to add or omit things while working. Painting and sculpture is not always a process of copying nature perfectly. And then there is atiisrtc skill. How skillful is the artist at rendering what he or she sees? The invention of photography (for good or ill)revolutionized the way we portray nature and people. It was realized with the viewing of some of the very first photographs that artists were not accurately copying figures and nature exactly as they really are. Look at someone like Michelangelo. So many muscles are added, and so many poses are unnatural. This is atiisrtc license at its most extreme. I find it doubtful that any photographer could have duplicated the "Girl in The Pearl Earring" exactly.

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