Capra Cu Trei Iezi

Girl With a Pearl Earring is based on the novel of the same name by Tracy Chevalier, a historical fiction about the creation of Johann Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring (1665). The painting (see below) was christened "The Mona Lisa of the North" when given to the Maurtishuis in 1902, an allusion to the indecipherable expression of the young lady. Since its rebirth early last century, the painting has been immortalized in verse by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre and John Updike; both poems are about the girl herself, not comprehensive evaluation developed in Chevalier's book. Little is known about Vermeer's life, so the fiction uses this liberty to construct a fiction about how the painting came to be--the story is actually an interpretive essay embodying both the ideas and passion of the painting, where a a strict scholarly essay would mute the painting into a clinical discussion. The book and film--though I prefer the film, for reasons I'll get to later--is not just an intellectual work, but an homage that exalts itself into the realm of art.

The story concerns a maid named Griet who works in the home of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) in the emotionally repressed Netherlands of the seventeenth century. The film interprets the girl as a pearl herself, obviously, with the fiction constructed around her developing this idea on many levels. Of course, she is closed off from the world by her parents, her social class, and her role in the Vermeer's home. In fact, Vermeer's studio is cloistered from the rest of the house, like a closed oyster to the seafloor, I suppose. But when Griet pries open the windows to let in a little light, Vermeer sees her beauty in the corner of his room, and she becomes ingrained in both him and the studio. Likewise, she is an agitation to the social order of the oyster home. The wife certainly doesn't like her spending so much time with Johannes; she's a shrew, for sure, as is her mother, but we see how the life of the Dutch artist is trapped within an oyster of patronage--the stress of the family's dependence on Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson, in a brilliantly smarmy turn) is a supreme agitation, the resulting pearls the wonderful works of the artist. This leads us to a discussion of the conflicting nature of love and beauty (including a richly symbolic scene in which the patron steals the servant from amongst the family's white sheets and attempts to rape her). This sounds like Altman-material, but had Altman directed this movie, he probably would have flow-cammed it into a class drama, with Vermeer standing in for the director