Husbands and Wives/Girl with a Pearl Earring

Some notes on a couple of films I’ve seen in the last few days. First of all the drama Husbands and Wives that Woody Allen struck gold with in 1992, justifying his scattergun approach of make-as-many-films-as-possible-and-hope-some-of-them-are-good. It garnered two Oscar nominations – Best Original Screenplay (written by Allen of course) and Best Supporting Actress for Judy Davis. The superior quality of the cast is what pushes this good script into more stratospheric realms; each actor has fettled their respective character to finely convey all the criss-crossing network of motivations and angsts without a hint of forced emotion or strange inorganic decision-making.

Allen plays his stock character (Gabe) of New Yawker awkward passivity, this time in the guise of a drama-baiting writer permanently dissatisfied with a stable personal life. He is pleasantly married to Mia Farrow’s Judy, a subtly manipulative magazine editor who suffers from relationship paranoia. They’re best of friends with another couple, Jack (Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Davis), who unexpectedly decide to split amicably. Husbands and Wives follows the personal fallout of that psychological shift on all four central characters. The failure of a marriage Gabe and Judy thought very strong drives a wedge between them, yet brings their counterparts together despite dalliances with younger partners (including Liam Neeson and his handsome Oirish accent). Davis was quite understandably the subject of many nominations and awards: she not only gets Judy’s hysterical mental volatility but nails the artistic pretentions and general obnoxious arrogance that makes her character so irritatingly effective. A brief mention too for a very young Juliette Lewis playing Rain the talented student catching Gabe’s eye: the self-deprecating seduction of an older at its finest, she adds a youthful – though not naïve, Rain is surprisingly pragmatic – aspect to the focus on middle-aged love.

Allen’s screenplay is a masterwork in how to organise and balance a four central character ensemble without ignoring any individual. The script encounters the story from a retrospective approach. The main characters are interviewed in a kind of psychologist manner by a neutral unknown. That narrative technique manages to arrow in on their motivations and reasoning whilst the plot unfolds concurrently. It’s a very efficient form of paralleled self-analysis. For Allen it’s quite serious material, a step away from his usual comedic material. Yet there are a few laughs, usually based around absurd situations – Jack dealing with a tantrum of his foolish young fitness guru girlfriend Sam (Lysette Anthony). Finally some of Calro Di Palma’s (a relation to Brian?) cinematography includes smooth tracking shots, techniques one wouldn’t ordinarily find in a thoughtful drama such as this.

Husbands and Wives takes a skewed microscope to love after marriage, but Girl With APearl Earring (2003) looks at a young girl seeking love. Well, kind of. It’s a movie based on a book based on the painting by Johannes Vermeer, fictionalising a romance between Vermeer (Colin Firth) and the servant girl the painting is supposedly inspired by (Griet played by Scarlett Johansson). Or is there really a romance between the two? Their short-lived passion appears to be fleeting and one-sided and there is little to no physical interaction between the two – if there are allegorical scenes for sexual encounters then they are not explicit enough. Vermeer is entranced by Griet’s pure and innocent beauty yet his affection comes in the form of a paternal relationship, with him as protector and benefactor. She is fascinated by Vermeer, but less with him and more so with his exquisite painting – Griet seems to spend most of her screen time staring wistfully at his work. Her heart belongs to Cillian Murphy, a local butcher.

The platonic relationship the two central characters is refreshingly terse and unusual. A period drama such as this is usually produced and promoted on the promise that it would provide ‘passionate love affairs’ that ‘transcend class boundaries in a post-feudal Europe’ – it’s nice that the unimaginative has not been indulged here, with more nuanced types of love pushed to the fore instead. Vermeer’s wife Catharina is a hysterical, whingey woman fraught with jealousy and financial concerns, and played superbly by Essie Davis. She is far removed from her husbands’s artistic temperament yet he feels bound by some loveless obligation to her, partly perhaps because her mother (Judy Parfitt) is vital in securing paid commissions for him.

The art direction and photography of Eduardo Serra was nominated for an Academy Award. It is a bright picture with vivid hues replicating Vermeer’s own artistic interpretation of his world (or so Wikipedia informs me). There are some great shots, close-ups of Johansson’ eye etc. The score, composed by the venerated Frenchman Alexandre Desplat, is similarly adroit at furnishing a saturatingly dramatic and lonely façade to 17^th century Holland.