Eyes Wide Shut
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| Starring | Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman Madison Eginton | |
| Directed by | Stanley Kubrick | |
| Written by | Stanley Kubrick | |
| Studio | Warner Home Video | |
| Released | July 16th,1999 | |
| Runtime | 159 minutes | |
| IMDB Info | 0120663 on IMDb | |
| Buy it from | Amazon.com on VHS | |
| Buy it from | Amazon.com on DVD | |
| Download it from | unbox @ Amazon.com | |
| Buy the book from | Amazon.com | |
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Stanley Kubrick was tempted to do "Eyes Wide Shut" in 1970, but Christianne, his wife, felt that her marriage could be in jeopardy, so she implored him not to do it... But "Eyes Wide Shut" came to be after all, the last temptation of Kubrick...
The film begins revealing the nice figure in high heels of Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman), moving in sliding motion her nice black gown... Alice is invited with her husband Dr. William (Tom Cruise) to a holiday party given by a New York wealthy broker called Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack).
While Alice is dancing half-drunk with an effusive Hungarian (Ski Dumont), she was, at the same time, spying on her husband who was flirting with two models... A ménage à trois is insinuated by the attractive girls, but a sudden interruption comes from Ziegler's private apartment which made the doctor climb upstairs to assist an attractive woman lying unconscious, repressed, overdosed!
The famous mirror love scene, between Alice and her husband, reflected a missing sexual desire between them both... William was kissing his lovely wife on the neck while her glance seemed weary and tired... It seems that the eroticism has vanished from her boring life... Only a little intimate contact is left... Is she truly recognizing a necessity for a change, maybe for a new husband much more nearby...
Looking for a certain sexual vengeance, Alice begins irritating her husband about adultery by testing his immunity, and relating some fantasy she had with a handsome naval officer last summer, she assures William that 'if the handsome office had wanted her,' she would have sacrificed everything, even her marriage and her child for one night stand!
Feeling his word destroyed into fragments, and walking the dangerous streets of New York, William remembered an old friend he met in the party, the piano player Todd Field (Nick Nightingale). He decides to pass by...
There, Nick divulges a secret... A secret place on Long Island... A château where he will be playing piano 'eyes shuttered'... But he continued, to get into the castle, one must have a mask, a disguise and he must 'know' the password...
With shades of Hitchcock's "Vertigo," Kubrick starts to play, at this point, with his characters... He seems escorting them and leading the audience for some purpose, for one definite performance he prepared his whole picture for it... Kubrick did not create a film about sex... He made a film about the conception of sex... He wanted us to explore something inside our mind that we usually prefer not to discover... Through his eyes a visual work appeared, a cinematic technique breathtakingly beautiful, a perfectionism, precise and mystical...
Reducing the dialog to a minimum, and with a distinguished confused music, we were in presence of a strange ceremonial rite, a picturesque ritual...
Based on a psychological drama, written by the Viennese novelist Arthur Schnizler, "Eyes Wide Shut" is a mirror, audaciously obsessive in its dazzling revelations, profound, provocative and passionate, transmitted in a frame of sex, fear and death, that we have to see with wide eyes fully opened...
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It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and there was no end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the picture, changed it, "fixed" it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting enigma of the director's death--and its eerie echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers. After all, virtually every movie of Kubrick's post-U.S. career had; only 1964's Dr. Strangelove opened to something approaching consensus. Quite apart from the author's tinkering, Kubrick's movies themselves always seemed to change--partly because they changed us, changed the world and the ways we experienced and understood it. And we may expect Eyes Wide Shut to do the same. Unlike Kubrick himself, it has time. So consider, as we settle in to live with this long, advisedly slow, mesmerizing film, how challenging and ambiguous its narrative strategy is. The source is an Arthur Schnitzler novella titled Traumnovelle (or "Dream Story"), and it's a moot question how much of Eyes Wide Shut itself is dream, from the blue shadows frosting the Harfords' bedroom to the backstage replica of New York's Greenwich Village that Kubrick built in England. Its major movement is an imaginative night-journey (even the daylight parts of it) taken by a man reeling from his wife's teasing confession of fantasized infidelity, and toward the end there is a token gesture of the couple waking to reality and, perhaps, a new, chastened maturity. Yet on some level--visually, psychologically, logically--every scene shimmers with unreality. Is everything in the movie a dream? And if so, who is dreaming it at any given moment, and why?
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