Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

This evening's film is Girl with a Pearl Earring directed by Peter Webber and released in 2003.

It stars Scarlett Johansson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson, Judy Parfitt, Essie Davis, and Cillian Murphy.

The story is set in the city of Delft in the Dutch republic in 1665.

A young woman, Griet, is the daughter of a delftware tile painter who's been left blind and disabled after an accident.

Her family sends her out to work as a maid in the crowded home of the artist Johannes Vermeer, his wife, Catharina, and their children.

The two supports of the family's wellbeing are Catharina's Imperious Mother, Maria Thins, and Vermeer's wealthy patron, the collector Pieter van Ruijven.

Griet is a quiet but attractive young woman and she finds herself having to negotiate a tangled scheme of tense household relationships, including her mistreatment by Vermeer's adolescent daughter Cornelia.

Outside of the house, Griet begins a tentative friendship with a young butcher's assistant, Pieter.

When Griet is given the job of cleaning Vermeer's studio, the artist discovers that she has a real appreciation for art, and more, understands its technical as well as its aesthetic aspects.

Vermeer's patron van Ruijven suggests the artist give him Griet to replace a maid van Ruijven has seduced and ruined.

Vermeer refuses, but instead offers his patron a painting with Griet as its subject.

Vermeer works on the painting in secret, arousing Catharina's suspicions about the exact nature of the relationship between her husband and the young maid who receives so much of his attention.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is based on the 1999 historical novel by Tracy Chevalier, A novel inspired by the young woman Johannes Vermeer painted, of the same name.

Vermeer is now considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, the peer of such artists as Frans Hals and Rembrandt.

But in his own time, Vermeer was regarded as a moderately successful genre painter known primarily in his own city, Delft, and in the Hague.

Most of his paintings represent the bourgeois domestic life of his own time and place.

As the Dutch author Hans Koningsberger says of Vermeer, "almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements, and they often portray the same people, mostly women."

What makes Vermeer's paintings distinctive is his portrayal of light and his use of color.

His canvases show scenes illuminated by light from a single source, usually at the upper left.

This light gives his subjects a tonal texture and imbues the mundane activities of daily life they present with an almost ethereal beauty.

He usually employed a base palette dominated by yellows and browns, over painted with a glaze composed of brighter colors, most notably reds, and the intense blue of lapis lazuli, the semi-precious stone prized by artists since ancient times.

Johannes Vermeer was born in October of 1632.

Most of what little is known about his life has been reconstructed from public records.

His father, Reijnier Janszoon, was initially a worker of silk, in a silk blend called caffa.

But Reijnier later began dealing in paintings and became an innkeeper, both businesses that Johannes continued after his father's death.

Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters, in December of 1653.

In 1662, he was elected head of the guild and was reelected three times.

With the burdens of his other responsibilities, Vermeer painted relatively slowly.

He probably produced three paintings a year, each painted to order for a buyer.

In 1653, Vermeer, who had been raised in the reform church, married a Catholic woman, Catharina Bolenes.

At some point, the couple moved into the large house owned by Catharina's widowed mother, Maria Thins, who was a woman of some wealth.

Vermeer lived and painted in that house for the rest of his life.

He and Catharina had 15 children, 11 of whom survived him at his death.

The family was comfortable, but not wealthy, and it appears that they were supported to some extent by Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins.

The household had the usual complement of servants, and Tracy Chevalier's fiction tells the story of one of those servants, the young Griet, who inspires Johannes Vermeer and becomes the subject of one of his best known paintings.

When Peter Webber took on the job of directing Girl with a Pearl Earring as his feature film debut, he wanted his presentation of the story to reflect accurately both the historical setting and the artistic vision of Vermeer himself.

He said in an interview, "What I was scared of, is ending up with something that was like Masterpiece Theater, very polite Sunday evening BBC kind of thing.

And I determined to make something quite different from that."

So the primary idea behind the costume designs, for example, was to take the real clothes from the period and reduce them to their essence.

There was limited dialogue, and Webber slowed the pace of the film to allow the actors to express emotion without words.

"The more silent the film became," he has said, "the closer it seemed to be to the condition of those Vermeer paintings and the closer it seemed to capture some kind of truth."

The specific look of Vermeer's canvases led cinematographer Eduardo Serra to use distinctive lighting and color schemes reminiscent of Vermeer's paintings.

During the films production, Webber and Serra worked together to create the different moods they wanted for each scene.

David Jays in Sight and Sound, praised their ability to "deftly deploy daylight, candle and shadow, denying our desire to see clearly just as Vermeer refuses to explicate the situations in his paintings."

Girl with a Pearl Earring won five international film awards, all of them for Eduardo Serra's cinematography.

When screenwriter Olivia Hetreed read Tracy Chevalier's novel before its publication, she was struck by the character of Griet and what she called, "her determination to be free in a world where that was almost impossible for a girl from her background."

Scarlett Johansson was in her late teens when she was cast as Griet.

Despite her impassive expression and clothing that conceals her body and hair, Griet becomes, in spite of herself, the object of other people's jealousy and desire.

Vermeer's adolescent daughter, Cornelia, torments Griet, and her mother Catharina sees her as a rival for her husband's affections.

Vermeer's patron, van Ruijven, sees her as another in a long line of pretty young maids he's determined to have and to ruin.

The young butcher Pieter wants her, despite her apparent lack of interest, and offers himself as a more suitable partner than anyone in the artist's household.

And Vermeer himself, intrigued by her artistic sensibilities and insight, is also taken by Griet's beauty, and her modeling for him takes on erotic overtones.

Whether he values her more for artistic or erotic purposes is never entirely clear, but his attentions, again, make her an unwitting object of someone else's designs and desires.

This is perhaps how director Webber and screenwriter Hetreed best show us that Griet's determination to be free is almost impossible for a girl from her background.

With a family unable to support her, Griet must make her way in life by serving others.

But being a servant means almost by definition doing and being what others demand of you.

Griet's youth and beauty, unadorned as it is, still subjects her to what feminists call the male gaze: the perception of a woman primarily as a sexual object for the pleasure of a heterosexual male viewer.

This is most obvious in the case of the lecherous Van Ruijven, who wants Griet for nothing more than the gratification of his sexual desires.

Pieter, the young butcher, also thinks of Griet primarily in romantic terms, although we might consider his desires more appropriate.

But arguably it is the character of Johannes Vermeer himself who most actively perceives Griet in terms of his own desires as both an artist and as a man.

It is Vermeer whose attentions to the maid disturb his wife, disrupt his family, and ultimately cost Griet her position in his household.

But it is also Vermeer the artist who in a painting immortalizes, not Griet, but his own idea of Griet as a beautiful young woman in a turban and a scarf, her ear bedecked with a pearl earring.

And ironically, it was his painting that later led first novelist Tracy Chevalier, and then screenwriter Olivia Hetreed and director Peter Webber, to recreate the interior life of that same young woman and give her again a life of her own, independent of the conflicting needs and desires of those around her.

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.