Girl with a Pearl Earring

Guys, this is your opportunity to become an instant intellectual! Girl with a Pearl Earring will bore your socks off, but if you know a few important points about the movie and its subject, you could turn it around to your advantage.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fictional story behind the painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” painted in 1665 by Johannes Vermeer, the not-so-famous Dutch painter. Although the plot of the movie is slow and undeveloped, and the characters are just about as flat as a frozen pond, the complete lack of any sub-plot more than adds to the mystery behind this film.

The movie is extraordinarily boring and is most likely only interesting to those that study art or to those that think they know something about art.

Here’s the key to your success, guys: If your girlfriend is an advocate of the arts, then this movie will make you seem like you know something about art, but you can’t just waltz into this film and expect to look like a saint. You’ll need some ammo.

First off, the girl in the actual painting was never identified, so you can rightly say that the entire movie is just a conflagration of historical fiction. You can also go on to say that a subject with a similar facial structure was painted in Vermeer’s earlier paintings, like, “The Art of the Painting,” painted between 1662 and 1668. This makes the movie completely impossible. Look how intelligent you are now!

But you can go further than this. Go on to comment on random things through the movie, like how the turban points to Vermeer’s love for Turkish fashion and rug hangings that he used extensively in his works. You can also reference the Pearl Earring itself. Pearls were a sign of wealth in Holland, and of these, the one used in the painting is of a ‘drop pearl’ design, one of the more fashionable pearls of that time. Vermeer used pearls with 11 of his subjects, 8 of whom wore ‘drop pearl’ shaped pearls. This pearl used in the painting was most likely borrowed from either a wealthy client, or from his mother-in-law, supporting the story that this pearl did not belong to the girl or Vermeer. This particular pearl is often referred to as the most beautiful and iconic of all Vermeer’s painted pearls.

Now that you have more than just a couple things to say about the movie during your post-movie coffee, we can expand a little further. During the movie, you are presented with a strange box contraption that is called a camera obscura. No attempt is made to explain why, but I’ll tell you. There is scientific evidence that he used the Camera Obsura to help define the structure of the painting.

Ok, you are close to becoming a true intellectual, you might also want to point out that the yellow garment worn in the Pearl Earring painting is similar in cut and fashion to the one worn by the subject in “The Art of the Painting.” You can also point out that the screenplay by Olivia Hetreed was based on a novel by Tracy Chevalier, who is known for her historical fictional novels. You can also point out that Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation) does a wonderful job at acting while saying almost nothing at all, but that will become painfully apparent 20 minutes into the film.

At least know you will know what the hell is going on, and more than that, you’ll look like the hero for explaining it to your date! You can thank me later.