[REVIEW] Girl With a Pearl Earring
Oct. 28th, 2004 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI was left stunned by my viewing of Girl With a Pearl Earring; so stunned, in fact, that I failed to post it. Here is my promised and long-awaited review.
The environment of the mid-17th century Dutch Republic struck me as quite modern, even in a provincial area like Delft. The protagonist's father is blinded from his career as a painter of Dutch tiles for export; the protagonist works in a prosperous urban home; efficient overlapping local and global networks of trade supply consumers with everything from freshly-butchered meet to the rarest pigments; print and paintings communicate text and image as precisely as possible for indefinitely periods of time, long after the sounds of spoken words and fleeting glimpses would have faded; interactions between individuals are pragmatic, based on desires for individual benefit.
I was last struck by this sort of feeling, of an abortive anachronism undermined by my knowledge, in April of 2003 when I visited the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics. The descriptions of the intensive research programs initiated by Britain, by France, by the German states, as they sought first to replicate then to cheaply imitate the advanced Chinese technology of porcelain echoed tellingly so many of our own time's catch-up efforts in specific industries and entire countries. The Dutch Republic, as Simon Schama describes in his The Embarrassment of Riches, was the test platform for modernity as early as the 17th century. Perhaps this innovativeness was a product of multiple factors: its advanced commercial culture; its religious diversity and necessary tolerance; its origins in a conscious effort of nationbuilding. For whatever reason, watching Girl With A Pearl Earring I was strongly reminded of my time at the Gardiner. Veritably Third World as Vermeer's Delft might have been, the basic contours of life were still recognizable to me.
The cinematography was superb. Vermeer, like the other painters in the glory years of the Dutch Republic, was concerned with preserving as close a semblance of reality as possible to his buyers. Likewise, the directors took great care to ensure that the movie's colour palette and the camera's framing of scenes replicated the reality of Vermeer's Delft as closely as humanly possible, down to the minutest of tones, even as each individual scene was made a self-contained complete work in itself. The movie was a visual pleasure to watch.
One thing of crucial importance to the plot was the importance of the gaze of Scarlett Johanson's maid, looking outwards towards the viewer.
When Vermeer's wife sees the painting, she reacts by proclaiming and mourning her sense of betrayal (by her husband who painted the maid, by her mother who facilitated the painting by giving Vermeer his wife's pearl earrings). For all of its modernity, Vermeer's Delft is a world where image is preserved privately and carefully, where people--especially women--are keep their images to themselves to avoid their cooption and violation. Vermeer's leering patron is shown as desiring the painting as a form of pornography, as a tolerable replacement for the subject's actual sexual innocence. Vermeer's wife, seeing how her husband captured that gaze while using her own prized earring, reacts exactly as if an act of adultery takes place and tries to destroy the painting with its gaze. One almost understands what proponents of the hijab mean by the intrusive presence of the male gaze; almost, because that genus of assumptions is predicated on the belief of female helplessness in patriarchy.
The characters of the movie are memorable. The maid, grows into a sense of her own self coupled with bolstered personal autonomy despite her job's challenges. Scarlett Johanson deserved her accolades. Colin Firth's Vermeer takes note of the maid's beauty, approaching but never achieving actual physical contact despite what is described as an unlikely close working relationship; his wife's sexual jealousy is aptly portrayed, just as Vermeer's mother-in-law's concern for the stability of her household pushes her to unthought-of acts. Vermeer's son Cornelius is given a remarkable presentation, provided an actively hostile rivalry based on pre-adolescent sexual jealousy as much as anything else.
The film is remarkable. I recommend that anyone who hasn't seen it so far see it now.
The environment of the mid-17th century Dutch Republic struck me as quite modern, even in a provincial area like Delft. The protagonist's father is blinded from his career as a painter of Dutch tiles for export; the protagonist works in a prosperous urban home; efficient overlapping local and global networks of trade supply consumers with everything from freshly-butchered meet to the rarest pigments; print and paintings communicate text and image as precisely as possible for indefinitely periods of time, long after the sounds of spoken words and fleeting glimpses would have faded; interactions between individuals are pragmatic, based on desires for individual benefit.
I was last struck by this sort of feeling, of an abortive anachronism undermined by my knowledge, in April of 2003 when I visited the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics. The descriptions of the intensive research programs initiated by Britain, by France, by the German states, as they sought first to replicate then to cheaply imitate the advanced Chinese technology of porcelain echoed tellingly so many of our own time's catch-up efforts in specific industries and entire countries. The Dutch Republic, as Simon Schama describes in his The Embarrassment of Riches, was the test platform for modernity as early as the 17th century. Perhaps this innovativeness was a product of multiple factors: its advanced commercial culture; its religious diversity and necessary tolerance; its origins in a conscious effort of nationbuilding. For whatever reason, watching Girl With A Pearl Earring I was strongly reminded of my time at the Gardiner. Veritably Third World as Vermeer's Delft might have been, the basic contours of life were still recognizable to me.
The cinematography was superb. Vermeer, like the other painters in the glory years of the Dutch Republic, was concerned with preserving as close a semblance of reality as possible to his buyers. Likewise, the directors took great care to ensure that the movie's colour palette and the camera's framing of scenes replicated the reality of Vermeer's Delft as closely as humanly possible, down to the minutest of tones, even as each individual scene was made a self-contained complete work in itself. The movie was a visual pleasure to watch.
One thing of crucial importance to the plot was the importance of the gaze of Scarlett Johanson's maid, looking outwards towards the viewer.
When Vermeer's wife sees the painting, she reacts by proclaiming and mourning her sense of betrayal (by her husband who painted the maid, by her mother who facilitated the painting by giving Vermeer his wife's pearl earrings). For all of its modernity, Vermeer's Delft is a world where image is preserved privately and carefully, where people--especially women--are keep their images to themselves to avoid their cooption and violation. Vermeer's leering patron is shown as desiring the painting as a form of pornography, as a tolerable replacement for the subject's actual sexual innocence. Vermeer's wife, seeing how her husband captured that gaze while using her own prized earring, reacts exactly as if an act of adultery takes place and tries to destroy the painting with its gaze. One almost understands what proponents of the hijab mean by the intrusive presence of the male gaze; almost, because that genus of assumptions is predicated on the belief of female helplessness in patriarchy.
The characters of the movie are memorable. The maid, grows into a sense of her own self coupled with bolstered personal autonomy despite her job's challenges. Scarlett Johanson deserved her accolades. Colin Firth's Vermeer takes note of the maid's beauty, approaching but never achieving actual physical contact despite what is described as an unlikely close working relationship; his wife's sexual jealousy is aptly portrayed, just as Vermeer's mother-in-law's concern for the stability of her household pushes her to unthought-of acts. Vermeer's son Cornelius is given a remarkable presentation, provided an actively hostile rivalry based on pre-adolescent sexual jealousy as much as anything else.
The film is remarkable. I recommend that anyone who hasn't seen it so far see it now.
