Netflix Sunday: Girl With A Pearl Earring

My Netflix queue is 124 titles long. That's 124 movies I have lined up to watch - and in between my desperately flagging schoolwork and other college activities, 124 anything feels like a burden. I am slowly, very slowly, making my way through the queue (although you know how it is; watch 1, add 5 more) so I thought I'd talk about my latest coup. Should this be, like, a regular thing? We will see, folks, we will see.



I just watched Girl With Pearl for the first time in many years and enjoyed it exponentially more. I'm not saying it's a cinematic great or anything, but I definitely didn't appreciate it half as much back then, partly because of the strange mixture of personalities in it – Colin Firth at his dark, brooding, gallant best; young Scarlett Johansson (more on her later – oh, I could write a book); criminally under-used young Cillian Murphy, nicely creepy Tom Wilkinson, etc. My current appreciation for all these ingredients has so far outstripped what little I felt about them when this movie first came out back in 2003. And the story itself, with all its juicy sexual politics. And Vermeer – oh, my favourite. I have to say I love Vermeer. I have never responded as strongly to another classical painter. I love his combination of rational clarity on the surface – those carefully lit planes and rich primary colors – and at the same time the sense of something coolly mysterious, impenetrable; the distant, concealed interiority of his figures. What are they feeling, what are they thinking? You get, at best, little suggestions, deliciously ambiguous.



And truly the young Scarlett Johansson was a thing of beauty. Her alabaster radiance is perfect for the part (hooray for Scandinavian genes, I guess). Her skin is so white and so soft-looking, those clear blue eyes like glass, and that complex mouth, the lovely full lips that inspire such a tactile desire. When Colin Firth reaches over (slowly and deliberately – so sexy) and brushes her mouth with his fingers, he is doing exactly what the viewer wants to do, I swear. STOP WASTING YOUR BOTTOMLESS POTENTIAL, SCARLETT. I have seen such depth in you!

Putting Lost in Translation on my queue immediately.