Peter Webber, 2003
How I have not written a review for this movie yet is baffling. I've watched in the range of Casablanca and American Beauty, and it actually hits on more things I hold dear in film and life. Girl verges on the religious for me, and not because one of the main themes is the difference in lifestyle between Catholics and Protestants.
Like Vermeer's paintings, Girl is painstakingly naturalistic in story, mood, visuals, and sound. A person's life is rarely consumed in a single plot line event. Most people handle tragedies like losing a job or inadvertently making a wife jealous, amongst getting married and your father going blind in a freak kiln accident. So too does Griet, heroine. The plot concerning paintings and Vermeer—the only one worth listening to, a butcher's fiance does little worth notice in her life—stops but Griet is not fazed.
Director and /or cinematographer, Peter Webber and/or Eduardo Serra, are clearly northern renaissance enthusiasts and familiar with how to copy the compositions of the time and place because shots and scenes often look far more like animated GIFs than they do like bits of movie. The three seconds of the servants eating with the family children, for example, seriously could be a Rembrant. Grit and her maid manager Tanneka sit upstage looking downstage and just left of center with the two eldest/tallest children flanking them facing each other so the audience sees them in profile. Two 5-7 year olds eat at the table with their backs turned to us to complete the circle. A single unseen candle is the only lighting and it shines forth from just right of center, making what would other wise be genuinely stodgy and overly framed (see Botticelli and most southern Renaissance paintings) is full of movement and not a little tension.
Like Austen novels that quiet, anal retentive romantics batedly devour, Girl hinges on layered tensions carefully folded into place. That is, the scene where nothing is said, but our heroine takes her skull cap off is one of the three climaxes. Editing (Kate Evans) contributes to movement, and even a feast-prep montage hurries things along. Webber will often end a cut on a percussive sound, like a floor brush scraping suds and sand off a step, and pick up on another, a hand pat to meat jelly or walking cane puncturing wood floor. It keeps attention up like little slaps to the face (if such are needed by ADD viewers with too much candy thrust in their faces).
Like my life, the rational is revered and the irrational hated, the artificial pointed at and respected for being so, even as it chases the natural essence of life. Vermeer immortalized seconds of life, fleeting impressions of life without reducing himself to half-blind approximations of brush strokes like the Impressionists claimed was true and correct. He captured human expression and emotion in those stills, not light on haystacks. However noble actual naturalists may be, they miss what is truly essential about vivid, conscious life in their ponderous dogma.
Tracy Chevalier, who wrote the book this screenplay is based on, captures this perfectly. She saw the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring, and noticed the surprised vulnerability on the model's face. Then she noticed that blue and yellow head dress was not exactly a fashion statement for the time. The artifice of the scarf, juxtaposed to the wetness of the girl's lips; the lack of facial make up juxtaposed to the rich weight of the pearl hanging from her one ear. How did a poor girl come to wear such a piece of jewelry in such a strange hair covering and be so turned on by it? A plot line was born of a few leaping assumptions.
Webber captures this. He lays out Chevalier's characters, motivations and actions growing naturally there from on a canvas at least as rich as one layered in “urine of elephants fed only on mango leaves” and precious stones otherwise hoarded by Tsars.
It is, in every way, the antithesis of Bad Boys 2 by Michael Bay, and although I appreciate an eleven minute car chase scene on an interstate with a never ending bridge on fire doused only in quippy swearing as much as the next adrenaline junky, it will never float my boat in quite the same way that almost touching fingertips daubed in ground lapis lazuli does.
That is, like the patron character Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson), Kiddo Porn most likely is fully clothed, sans the word “fuck” and accompanied by piano solos. 'Cus if you have to actually see people getting it on in order for your brain to engage, you are going to miss some crucial details that make the whole effort futile.
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