My fascination with the work of Vermeer started when I was very young. With my sister and girlfriends, I often played Masterpiece, a board game where players participate in art auctions, trying to determine which painting is a fake and which one is worth a fortune. I always got lucky with a specific painting which often made me a millionaire (in Parker Brothers money, of course). It was The Little Street by Vermeer, and because it brought me luck, I must have become curious about the painter and did a little reading on the subject.
Years later, at a poster sale on the campus of San Francisco State University, I fell in love with a large reproduction of The Girl with a Pearl Earring. I became so fond of this image that I decided to incorporate it in an experimental short film I made while I was in school. Once again Vermeer brought me luck: my 16mm movie won the prize for best film in the graduate student competition of my college. Because of that prize, my short film got to tour around various international festivals.
I quickly discovered that I was not the only person fascinated by that painting, as shown by the huge success of Tracy Chevalier’s novel inspired by the famous girl. It took me a few years after the book came out to finally decide to read it because I was afraid that Chevalier’s vision would ruin my appreciation of the mysterious painting. I didn’t need to worry: I thought the novel was very beautiful, delicate and even suspenseful, and the pleasure of reading it compensated for the loss of mystery.
With all this background, you can imagine how nervous I was, a few months ago, when I saw a preview for a movie based on The Girl With A Pearl Earring! Oh please, no, I thought. Don’t make this into a sexual obsession story, don’t ruin the delicate relationship between the model and the painter by turning in into a banal forbidden love story! But then I look at this gorgeous image of Scarlett Johansson and my hopes are up. After all, the director, Peter Webber, is a self-confessed cinephile with unusal credits, and the light in the preview looks absolutely amazing. After looking at Maciej’s photos of Dutch streets, I’m also looking forward to the opportunity of traveling back in time and walking the streets of Delft in 1665.
All the ingredients are there for me to enjoy this movie: A painter I admire, a book I loved, a good casting choice for the main character, gorgeous settings, non-Hollywood director and producers and a chance to observe once again the delicate art of adaptation, a subject that greatly interests me (I always love to read the book first in order to better appreciate the screenwriters work). Let’s hope they didn’t turn this into some stupid pseudo-erotic stereotypical story and that they will give a lot of room to the paintings. If there’s no shot of the painter watching the model washing her breasts in a basin, everything should be fine… The author of the book claims she loved the film, so I guess that’s reassuring.
Can you tell that I’m excited?