For the three folks who requested second helpings after GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING*, this time with romantic potboiler tropes tossed in the painterly 17th Century mix. Our story, and honest to Pete, this really is our story: Alicia Vikander, infertile second wife of wealthy, older burgher Christoph Waltz (a guy who chats with and names his engorged penis) falls for portrait painter Dane DeHaan just as he hits the jackpot in the tulip bulb spec market. Meanwhile, her housemaid is preggers by the fishmonger, another tulip bulb winner. But then he’s robbed & shanghaied off to sea, leaving the maid to shame & disgrace. Perhaps they could ‘plant’ the baby on the wife? And then let a fake death-during-childbirth sort out all these complicated affairs. Sure! That’s a good idea! What could possibly go amiss? If this sounds like a parody of historical fiction, co-scripter Tom Stoppard may have thought so too, as the film more than occasionally drops it’s swoon to lean in a comic direction. Half-heartedly so, as novelist/co-scripter Deborah Moggach presumably had first whack at the screenplay and takes her own storyline seriously. It leaves director Justin Chadwick with solid production values and an itch to hide as much as possible with an overabundance of pointlessly choppy editing and swooping camera moves. For camouflage? No wonder this sat on the shelf for a couple of years before opening to general indifference.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Actually, GIRL/’03 is a perfectly watchable pic.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Note this obscurant b&w poster, hiding everything in the pic (Old Amsterdam, faux Vermeer, tulip trading, period detail, storyline), but playing up the sex. An old advertising trick that couldn’t have fooled many paying customers.
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