Girl with a Pearl Earring: Film Review

Chevalier’s novel creates a fairly believable tale around the portrait that gives name to the film. She imagines as the subject for that painting a young maid, Griet, in Vermeer’s house. Griet has to go into domestic service after an accident that leaves his father out of work. She will have to clean the room of the artist under the watchful eye of the other women in the house.

 

While she is cleaning Vermeer notices her interest for his work. Vermeer is asked a portrait of Griet and she posses for him. This becomes their relationship much more intimate and it arouses suspicion and jealousy in Vermeer’s wife.  

It can be seen the sensibility when portraying vermeer’s works. The paintings are also considered an extension of the artists’ insight character.  It has little dialogue. Communication is created from gesture and even a little glance is full of significance.

It was easy to get the point of the film. I have liked it very much because it went deep in the paintings and how Vermeer created them. What I have not liked at all, was that obsession that Vermeer has with Griet. But in general I considered it a rich and artful film. 

Asleep

I have to enter the net in order to find information about the painting I have chosen. I was supposed to analyze “young woman sleeping”, and I realized that there are many versions and hypothesis about why is that maid asleep at the table. When I saw the painting for the first time, it attracted me because the face of the maid seemed calmed and she seemed to be in a stage over tranquillity and with her mind flying away from all the perfection that could be seen in the scene. It seemed to me that she was taking a good rest after a hard day of cleaning and doing all the housework. But there are many writers who have claimed that the blush in her cheeks and that profound sleep was due to the drunkenness of the figure.

 

According to john Nash, “The evidence that the young woman in the Metropolitan painting is, indeed, drunk, is there on the table before her, in the form of not one but two glasses and a wine jug. A small wine-glass suitable for a young woman stands almost empty within her reach. The overturned glass at the near side of the table beside the white wine jug is a roemer (or rummer) of the kind used by men. Neither glass is immediately obvious. The woman’s glass appears to be intentionally concealed, being almost submerged within the brilliant reds of the carpet, but the overturned rummer has been abraded by overzealous cleaning, or, possibly, to remove obvious signs of indulgence.”

 

 

        I have to consider the experts while approaching the painting so I have to take into account John Nash’s view among others. But obviously in the creative process in which I will be involved, the certainty can be left aside for the sake of inspiration.