According to various sources, Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), directed by Peter Webber and starring Scarlett Johansson as Griet, offers a carefully crafted fictional account inspired by the iconic painting of the same name by Johannes Vermeer. Critics agree that the film successfully evokes the visual world of the Dutch master with notable sensitivity. Based on the novel by Tracy Chevalier, the story is set in 17th-century Delft and follows a young maid who becomes a quiet yet pivotal presence in the painter’s studio. The subtle tension between artist and model—shaped by differences in class, gender, and power—finds its resolution in the act of painting, the only form of consummation permitted. With its mise-en-scène echoing the chiaroscuro and composition of Baroque canvases, the film turns each frame into a living painting. Johansson’s restrained, almost wordless performance, along with Eduardo Serra’s Oscar-nominated cinematography, supports a narrative that explores looking, longing, and the impossibility of fulfillment—placing artistic creation as a space of intimacy, contemplation, and transgression.

I must confess: I haven’t seen the film. I will, eventually—perhaps in the coming years, when time and the right state of mind allow. Therefore, what follows is a judgment based on a single frame, one image, selected by one or more individuals for a very specific purpose—of which I have only a vague, remote idea.

That said, we’re standing at a fork in the road. I did a bit of research and found that the production companies behind the film—Pathé Pictures International, Archer Street Productions, and Delux Productions—based their promotional poster on an image quite close to the one at hand. This version also features the abstracted profile of Colin Firth as a thoroughly overwhelmed Johannes Vermeer. In that composition, Johansson’s gaze peers through a different window—one far more fortunate.

Other media outlets, other companies, other interests chose instead the image we’ve decided to dissect. Firth disappears, and with him, the ambiguity and mystery of the actress’s expression. What remains is a look—an expression—that drags us down from the clouds and buries us knee-deep in a pasty, sensorial hyperreality.

Worse still: content creators everywhere took that second version and tampered with it—colors saturated to the point of rupture, contrasts amped up to the extreme, seducing us in the same way one might market a greasy hot dog drowned in ketchup and mustard.

And that, precisely, is the source of my unease—my rejection.

Yes, it is Scarlett Johansson, of course—but framed this way, she’s reduced to a silent symbol of submission, a bottled-up representation of repressed desire. In Vermeer’s original, I’d have to dig deep to find a trace of such a reading. Here, I have to run so it doesn’t all collapse on top of me. She waits for the line to be crossed—for someone to pull her out of the painting.

Two elements are key: the mouth and the gaze.

The mouth, half open, with an ‘active’ parting—perhaps unconscious, perhaps deliberate, it hardly matters—when read through the lens of human affective signalling, suggests total availability: emotional, physical, same difference. Clearly and unequivocally erotic. Which, in and of itself, is not the problem. It’s just that, by contrast with the source, it feels unsubtle, vulgar—delicately obscene. Because through that brief, humid gap rushes a torrent of disturbing interpretations: from acceptance to vulnerability. A range as vast as the visible spectrum of human color perception. In Renaissance art, in traditional portraiture, closed mouths signal modesty; open mouths, rapture, ecstasy, trance.

If the film ventures into the terrain of perfect eroticism… then let the party begin. But the film is not the subject of this essay.

That same mouth—like a ripe, saturated peach—amplifies its symbolic charge when paired with the gaze. Moist, anesthetized, defeated, unequivocally pre-coital, it evokes the image of a learned virgin imploring her own defilement. The whole composition, at first glance and unfiltered, reminds me of a doll hung on a wall to dazzle and halt the compulsive scrollers.

To be honest… the image, while it may contain original sin, has only been corrupted by content creators. From the websites that spread it indiscriminately to the poor devils of insomnia. This version—the one that circulates through the networks—strays far from what the film’s creators, it seems, once envisioned, long ago...

How do you sell a film about a 17th-century young lady whose gaze says everything and, at the same time, nothing?

Well—there you have it.

Note
This painting has been reinterpreted by everyone —even the guy who does karaoke at office parties… Whoever the model was, she must now feel, in her ethereal eardrums, the echo of a sustained and intolerable groping