Framed

A study in Scarlett: Johansson as the object of Vermeer's affection.

Girl with a Pearl Earring's romance of imprisonment.

by Cindy Fuchs

The light is exquisite, the shadows delicate. A girl leans over a kitchen table, her head lowered in concentration, her knife chopping -- onion, cabbage, carrot. She barely notices, as she arranges the pieces, perfectly, that her mother has entered the room. It's time to leave home for her new place of employment. Stern and worried, her mother warns, "Keep clear of their Catholic prayers."

It's appropriate that Girl with a Pearl Earring begins with this domestic scene, part precious, part painful. The girl, Griet (Scarlett Johansson), is going to work as a maid for Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth), 17th-century Dutch master of domestic compositions. The rest of Peter Webber's film, adapted by Olivia Hetreed from Tracy Chevalier's novel, focuses on evolving tensions in the Vermeer household. Not only are her employers Catholic and Griet a churchgoing Protestant, not only are they upper middle class and she working class, but the master's wife, Catharina (Essie Davis), begins to suspect her husband favors the servant.

He does, in fact. And though Griet -- alabaster pale and utterly lovely -- knows her place and values her virginity, she's also intrigued by his art. He shows her how to appreciate light, mix paints and look through the camera obscura he's just had delivered to his studio. Griet aptly catches her breath and looks shyly at each item Vermeer sets before her, so he can think himself her ideal instructor and generous paternal benefactor. At the same time, he poses for her too, glowering, shaking his arty long hair so it falls alluringly across his eyes.

Of course, their class and other differences won't allow them even to consider doing more than look at one another. Besides, he's busy most nights, apparently impregnating Catharina, who begins the film pregnant, gives birth and is pregnant again by the end. (The Vermeers had 12 children in all.) She also has other children in the house, in particular 12-year-old Cornelia (Alakina Mann, as disturbing here as in The Others). This little girl is easily the movie's creepiest effect: Her face strangely stony, her eyes too knowing, Cornelia peers around corners and through windowpanes, making it her business to persecute Griet because she can, and because she's alarmed by her father's wandering eye. Whether she's protecting her whimpery mother, her own familial possessiveness or her precocious understanding of class difference remains an appropriate muddle.

Less alarmed, or at least more willing to tolerate the artist's indiscipline, is Catharina's mother, Maria (Judy Parfitt), who lives with the Vermeers and keeps the books. As the family lives from commission to commission, she's perpetually trying to gear up for the next one. Seeing that both Vermeer and his lusty (and unashamedly aggressive) patron, Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson), are moved by Griet, Maria overlooks potential impropriety in order to ensure a contract for Vermeer. Predictably, she blames Griet for the men's intemperance; spotting the 17-year-old lost in thought before a canvas, she upbraids her, "You're not the first to forget your manners in front of his paintings."

Still, Maria knows that manners are a function of pretense and practicality. And she makes her own use of them -- along with secrets and betrayals -- going so far as to arrange for the girl to "borrow" Catharina's showy pearl earrings for the famous portrait; this in turn leads to an unsubtle scene in which the artist pierces his model's ear, as well as a nasty reprisal by Cornelia, who espies the exchange.

As much as Griet looks the hapless victim of such machinations, she finds her own way to use her charms, with the butcher's son, Pieter (Cillian Murphy). Eager to please, he takes her out on her days off, literally: The scenes with this shy boy (he tends to gaze on his prize and rarely look at the camera) are among the few that take place out of doors. The camera looks up at them as they run over a horizon, framed so the sky seems to blossom behind their embrace. But this refreshing energy is soon reduced when Griet uses the boy to release her own pent-up feelings for the painter. Like the other men who come within her range, however, Pieter is all too willing to engage at any level he can.

Not very originally, Girl with a Pearl Earring submits that art is all about sublimation, that observation leads to desire and inspiration. Griet is shot and lit like a Vermeer painting by cinematographer Eduardo Serra, the effect enhanced by the "romance" of her perpetual longing and confinement. That the film ends on the painting, pulling out slowly from the earring to reveal the girl's parted lips (moistened by Griet at her master's behest) and beguiling eyes, only underlines the impossibility of her ever moving beyond the frame.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Directed by Peter Webber A Lions Gate release Opens Friday at Ritz East

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