Girl With A Pearl Earring is a 2003 drama about a young peasant maid working in the house of painter Johannes Vermeer who becomes his talented assistant and the model for one of his most famous works.
At the start of Peter Webber‘s 2003 period film Girl With A Pearl Earring, we slowly enter a small, dark room in a Dutch countryside cottage, somewhere in 1665. Standing at a wooden table with a large kitchen knife is a petite young woman in traditional daily dress and headwrap. She is preparing a platter of sliced vegetables meant for a cooking pot, and as the film’s credits appear on screen, we watch as she uses her left hand to delicately cut through these colorful foods with a powerful sense of familiarity and routine before laying them carefully upon a wide dish with a special kind of care. It’s intoxicating to watch. But why does it matter?
Girl With A Pearl Earring is an art film, and I don’t mean that like an independently-made arthouse movie, but rather a story about actual art, specifically painting. It centers on Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch artist (played by Colin Firth in the film) who mostly painted middle-class life with subjects indoors, often using the light from adjacent windows in his work. In the fictionalized film, he is well-off but indebted to others, living in an unhappy domestic home. One day, needing more staff to run his household, Griet (Johansson) is sent to become a maid, her own father unable to work and employing his daughter to survive.
Once at the Vermeer home, trying to adjust to her new life, lovely but shy Griet is given access to Vermeer’s upstairs studio to clean, a place even his wife never enters, and here begins a curious relationship with the painter, he recognizing she has a talent for understanding the art of mixing colors and an appreciation for the craft. This inspires him (as does her striking beauty) and she soon becomes a subject of his work, and then … maybe more.
Avoiding spoilers, let’s just focus on that wonderful opening shot as the film seems to begin innocuously on Griet in her family home, about to learn the news that she will be leaving. Webber cuts in close as the left-handed Griet slices ever so mesmerizingly into the vegetables; white onions, orange carrots, purple cabbage, violet beets, green lettuce. She then splays them onto the dish with purposeful display, seemingly categorized and arranged with their color in mind like that of a painter’s palette. She even gives the plate a gently spin as if their position on the table itself could be made more visually attractive.
As a viewer not knowing where the film is going yet, this all seems unimportant, and we might even be wondering why Webber is putting all his attention on the food rather than the lovely Johansson. But for the keen eyed – and maybe artistically inclined – this little moment means a lot, establishing from the start without a single word spoken, that Griet is much more than a cook or housemaid, but a young woman with an untapped talent. It draws a line to the film’s heart later where she is in Vermeer’s studio mixing colors, that same sensual left hand grasping a different tool in creating a new palette. It’s a great movie moment.