Scarlett Johanssen looks as much like the Girl With A Pearl Earring as Nicole Kidman looks like Virginia Woolf. Which is not a huge problem, as the film is much more about her mooning around the house feeling a bit hard done by. Luckily, since she rarely articulates this in words, the film has a great score to give us hints on her moods and that the narrative is indeed moving on. Because actually very little happens in GWAPE. But the punchy score to makes up an awful lot, managing to whisk us from one Vermeer-esque set piece to the next. The only real problem the film has is in the suggestion that artists painted faded, dirty and cracked paintings from the get go. I suppose there is little it can do for a reproduction point of view, we know these paintings as being a bit dull and cracked, with their urine varnishes. It is odd though the kind of attention displayed in making Johanssen’s hands authentically scabby did not carry over to a re-imagining of the paintings.
(Jonathon Ross did the pearl necklace joke last week, so I shall not be attempting it.)