Aging Disgracefully

"Girl with a Pearl Earring" tells the story of the girl who is the subject of a famous Vermeer of the same name. Dire economic straits force this upstanding Protestant girl into the Catholic, and thus somewhat dysfunctional, house of Vermeer (if this were a popular blog, I would at this point remind you that I was raised Catholic and then suggest where you could stick your accusations of an anti-Catholic agenda, but this isn't a popular blog and so I need not concern myself with the prospect of hundreds of angry comments). While she is quickly, and predictably, absorbed by the heavy domestic chores beholden upon a maid in mid-17th century Amsterdam (I'm no art history person, but I think, and got the idea from the film, that Vermeer was active at some point in the 17th century urban Netherlands, and hence this is just a guess based upon those assumptions), Griet also begins her initiation into Vermeer's world. It begins innocently enough as Griet is assigned to clean Vermeer's studio (a mysterious place for the Vermeer family, as well as the household staff). Colin Firth plays a distracted, introspective and frankly somewhat morose Vermeer. He may have only marginal consciousness of the everyday life of his household, but he immediately recognizes Griet's artistic sensitivity. In short order, she inspires one work and becomes the specific subject of another while Vermeer helps her refine her artistic awareness. In this she probably fills a deep need for the emotionally isolated Vermeer. His mother-in-law is a crass (if admittedly practical) manager who sees Vermeer's work as little more than a trade, while his nuclear family is made up of a wife whose only real sources of sensitivity revolve around her insecurities and an ever growing brood of kids who take after mother.

There is a clear, if repressed, attraction between Griet and Vermeer (there is another man in Griet's life, a young suitor named Pieter whose place in the narrative framework is a bit unclear to me). The film is built around this repressed longing and common search for artistic epiphany, and I felt that it carries it off convincingly. The film is also beautifully shot (so much so that there are several scenes which leave you with some plausible appreciation of the visual stimuli that inspired Vermeer) and accompanied by a very beautiful classically inspired soundtrack. However, I don't think that the point of the film is to make us party to the secrets of Vermeer's genius, or to offer an explanation of the identity of the girl with the pearl earring (I somehow recall once being told that the real-life model's identity is lost to history). Rather, the film simply tells a story, of a tortured genius and a bright but intellectually unrealized servant girl, who each possess a certain capacity for understanding that those around them do not appear to share but that they recognize in each other. And, in this setting of intellectual isolation, an intense if sublimated emotional bond emerges.