Director Peter Webber’s movie Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) throbs with sexual tension as it dramatizes an imagined backstory behind the famous portrait by Johannes Vermeer.

Watching this film, we feel immersed in the damp, canal streets of 17th century Delft, an atmosphere that gives off the suggestion of fertility. Scarlett Johansson is Griet, her mouth always parted as if unconsciously and sensually waiting for her sexual hunger to be fed. She is the maid who has come to work in the Vermeer household containing Vermeer’s wife, mother-in-law, his children and other servants. Colin Firth as Vermeer can barely contain his seething passion for Griet, who (he quickly realizes) profoundly understands the power of color and light. They are kindred souls in this sense, but their unconsummated sexual affair can only be realized in displaced ways.

Vermeer teaches her Griet to make paint in a sensual, tactile scene filled with the colorful mashing of ingredients and mixing of fluids. He puts his robe over the two of them, as if under bed covers, while they look into a camera obscura. Before she eventually sits as the subject of the painting, he must pierce her ear so that she can wear the pearl earring. This scene suggests sexual penetration as he plunges the needle through her earlobe, spilling virginal blood. Even though they do not physically act on their passion, Vermeer knows that their connection is illicit, as is shown when he tells her to buy materials for his paint but says that his wife need not know about the errand.

The film is filled with sexual displacement and frustration. Vermeer cannot have Griet, or women of a lower order like her, so he keeps getting his wife pregnant. Then he continues to feel unfulfilled. His wife is unable to understand his art and thus is unable to satisfy him, so she is jealous of Griet. Vermeer’s mother, wanting the family to prosper financially, basically acts as a madam, urging Griet to make herself available in order to help her son-in-law’s creative juices flow. She procures her daughter’s testicular-shaped pearls for the artistic climax. Tom Wilkinson plays the lascivious patron who lusts after the objects of Vermeer’s portraits (and almost rapes Griet) but can in the end only possess the two-dimensional female depictions.

Right after the ear-piercing scene, Griet runs off to a bawdy bar, seeks the butcher boy who wants her, and indulges her lust for Vermeer by having sex with the boy. Vermeer’s daughter, filled with Freudian jealousy toward Griet, tries to frame the maid for stealing. She also smears with mud the white (sexually unsullied?) hanging sheets that Griet has cleaned, painting her own canvas almost in rebellion against her father’s attraction to Griet.

When Griet sees the finished painting, she says to Vermeer, “You looked inside me.” The line tells us there has been a spiritual penetration, though not a physical one. Somehow, in withholding the sexual act itself, Girl with a Pearl Earring becomes more sexually charged and sensually expressive than any explicit depiction of sex could be.