I have abandoned the practice of reading movie reviews before seeing a film. Overall buzz keeps me away from the real stinkers (The Brown Bunny, Cat in the Hat). As for the rest, I like to make up my own mind, and am not an overly harsh critic, having walked out on only two films in my life (Red Dawn and Beloved).
But I could not have been dragged from my seat during Girl with the Pearl Earring. I admit I was primed for the movie, by all of my thinking of late, by having read the book, and by the idea of slowness itself, which has really seeped into my being even moreso than usual just these past days, (and if it affects my blogging too, sorry, but that means I’m on the right track). As I mentioned, my husband gave me Debra Ollivier’s book Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide for Getting in Touch with Her Inner French Girl for Valentine’s Day. One of the ideals the author praises as being particularly “French” is that of slowness. Supposedly, in the world of the French woman, though I do not see why the French should have a cultural monopoly on the good things (nor do I think they do), time is not money. Time is life.
“As [Edith] Wharton once described it, real life is deep and complex and slowly developed, and has its roots in fundamental things. And you cannot experience those fundamental things, or true pleasure in life, without taking your time.”
What are fundamental things? Ollivier goes on to say the small rituals of daily life—the family meal, the hour of solitude, the pilgrimage back home, the monthly evening out with an inner circle of friends (and if you haven’t got these things, take the time to get them).
So, as I say, I was primed, in a lovely, slow, delicious way to see Girl with a Pearl Earring unfold on screen. To top it off, the trailer immediately preceeding the movie, was for a French film called Monsieur Ibrahim; the last line uttered by Omar Shariff: “The secret to happiness is to slow down.”
I threw up a look to the powers that be: “Okay, Okay already. You’re preaching to the choir here.”
And then the movie began and my choir robe fell off. I felt greedy, rapacious, pushing my eyes and ears to the limit to take it all in. The movie lived up to my imagination in every way, even exceeded it, which could mean that my imagination is out of shape or that I read the book too quickly--for example, I don’t recall there being sounds in my 16th century Delft at all; not the lovely sound of wooden shoes on wooden floors, not the raising of the shutters, the whack of the butchers axe, the gurgling of the boiling vats of water for laundry, the sound of polishing, rubbing, scrubbing, the scraping of tiles, the mashing of mortar and pestle. I was hungry for the sounds, the sights and the details of domestic & artistic life. I wanted to be slow, but could not. Certainly I was longing for things every bit as forcibly as Griet longed for the touch of Colin Firth’s sexy Vermeer or as my friend Hugh longed for Scarlett Johanssen’s lips.
Hugh says film is a passive medium, but it did not feel like a passive experience to me; maybe because the film was deliciously flawed—the characters weren’t rounded out; you had to imbue them with your own interpretations. You had to figure out what they feeling, fearing, loathing, craving; the deliciousness being, when you did, you felt it too. Also, I felt the ending was far more satisfactory in the movie than in the book—in the book there were too many words, too much explanation, too little room for interpretation.
More on the ending next time. . .
2:01:10 PM 
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