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EYES WIDE SHUT
Stanley Kubrick’s last film closely follows an early 20th-century Arthur Schnitzler novella and transfers it from Vienna to contemporary New York. A sympathetic young doctor and his wife (Bill and Alice, played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) are well-off and devoted to their young child. They seem happily married until they have a disturbingly frank argument about “sexual temptation,” to use Catholic terminology.
We then follow the agitated husband through two days of encounters which suggest that society is both obsessed and sick about sex from top to bottom. Worse, the pursuit of erotic pleasure proves to be dangerous, both in the medical sense and in the murderous we’ll kill you if you talk sense.
The peak (or depth) of his odyssey is a satanic, elaborately staged orgy for the decadent rich, costumed and masked, at a country mansion. Bill stumbles on a dirty secret that the powerful will never allow him to reveal.
When he returns to Alice, she tells him of a nightmare of her own imagined infidelities. Their fantasies and feelings of guilt change them. The story is probably more Freudian (Schnitzler was a pal of his) than a Christian cautionary tale, but it has the same effect. The dominant final images are consoling family symbols of Christmas.
Eyes Wide Shut can reasonably be described as pessimistic filmmaker Kubrick’s La Dolce Vita, and is vulnerable to the same criticism: In seeking to explore the perils of sexual obsession, it is obsessed. The nudity and sexual innuendo are theme-related and insistent. Kubrick is also likely to be attacked for being stuffy and taking it all so solemnly and seriously at a time when sexual liberation propaganda is much more cool. An art film, possibly a great film, certainly not for the casual or faint of heart with reservations for mature viewers.
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