This latest gallery film concentrates on Vermeer’s celebrated Girl With a Pearl Earring painting, itself of impeccably middlebrow spin-off lineage after the successful novel by Tracy Chevalier and subsequent film adaptation. It’s a middle-of-the-bat study of the work, with a bit of context thrown in, draped around a wider PR project of puffing the newly reopened Mauritshuis gallery in the Hague. I suspect it may be pushing the limits of what a cinema audience will go for – a hot ticket exhibition like Late Rembrandt this isn’t – and ends up caught between acting as a substitute for the gallery experience and trying to stand up as a film in its own right. But it’s not without interest.
