DELFT, Netherlands, June 30 (UPI) -- "Girl with a Pearl Earring," ran for 15 months in the Lumen Theater in Delft before being taken off a week ago. The quiet little film about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's obsession with his family's young maid who became the subject of one of his best known works is set in the small Dutch town of narrow, cobbled streets crisscrossed with canals, so Delft's 96,000 inhabitants had a proprietary feeling about it.
Yet the production company spent only one day filming on location in Delft itself. One of those devastating 17th century fires erased much of the town's appearance as Vermeer had known and in fact had painted it. The film, starring British actor Colin Firth as Vermeer, and the luminous Scarlett Johansson as the maid was shot in a studio in Luxembourg. In the one scene filmed in Deflt, Johansson walks past a large house with red shutters, which happens to be Delft's town hall, and that's about it.
"People here went to see the film, and claimed to have identified their own homes in it when the reality is that the film was shot on a studio-built set," Jeroen Beelen, Delft's director of marketing said Thursday. "But it captures the atmosphere of Delft, and the important thing is what the film has done for Delft."
Delft officials say the film gave tourism a significant boost, and broadened public interest in the genius who painted the work that inspired the movie by the same name, and the novel by Tracy Chevalier on which it was based. The number of visitors to Delft last year topped the 1 million mark, which was around 100,000 more than the previous year. But many tourists look in vain for sites where the movie was filmed, and for locations associated with the artist.
Though Vermeer lived and died in Delft, Beleen calls him "the town's ghost" because little physical evidence of this lifelong association remains except for his grave in the Old Church, discovered some 20 years ago; and even that is disputed by some Vermeer scholars.
Vermeer is truly an artist who survives through his work, but there are no Vermeer paintings in Delft, not even the "Meisje met de Parel" -- the Girl with the Pearl -- which is in the Maurithaus Museum in The Hague a dozen miles away. The closest Delft gets to owning a Vermeer is the collection of reproductions of every one of the artist's known works in the lobby of the Johannes Vermeer Hotel.
Even without the physical evidence, Delft is inventive in advancing the Vermeer connection, and the film has provided new opportunities. Recently, fliers promoting a travel competition with a stay in Delft as the prize were put into 80,000 DVD copies of the "Girl with the Pearl Earring" movie mainly for sale in Britain. According to Beelen, among the interactive features being considered is a camera set-up for taking pictures of tourists wearing replicas of the headdress worn by the girl in Vermeer's painting, and a pearl earring.
But the truth is that even without the Vermeer connection, Delft is a remarkably well preserved historic town well worth an excursion from The Hague or Amsterdam. Its core historic area is both authentic and picturesque -- frozen in time because after a positively hectic 17th century it became something of a backwater. A handsome late-Gothic house (1645) houses, as it always has, the Dike Conservancy Board, the headquarters of the organization that looks after the Netherlands's network of water dikes.
Delft's main museum may not have any Vermeers hanging on its walls, but it does have distinguished works by some of his contemporaries. The Nieuew Kirk (New Church) and the Oute Kirk (Old Church) are Delft's twin religious sites; and if the spire of the Old Church seems to lean crazily in the afternoon sun it's not the famous Delft beer: the tower is tilted 6 feet away from the perpendicular at the top.
The New Church is where for centuries members of the Dutch royal family have found a final resting place, and Delft has witnessed the panoply and solemnity of three royal funerals in the last five years, first Prince Klaus, husband of the present Queen Beatrix, then last year Queen Juliana, mother of the present monarch, and shortly afterwards Prince Bernhard, Juliana's husband.
