If you remember July 1999, the time Stanley Kubrick's final film "Eyes Wide Shut" premiered to audiences, it was regarded with little fan fare. Though the film started strong its opening week thanks largely to the controversy surrounding the infamous sex scenes, and the star power of then husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, it soon proved to be a disappointment. Many critics found it to be "unsexy", and audiences didn't know what to make of Kubrick's unique fluid camera movement. The film was taken too literally and was unfairly mocked by the mainstream press, they turned Kubrick's commercial arthouse film into a failure.
Ten years have past since the initial release of the film and it is now time to take another look at this underrated gem. If there is one director who's films deserve a second viewing it's Stanley Kubrick. To me his films are like listening to classical music, all carefully composed, and rich in depth. Kubrick isn't for the impatient, but for the person who can take in every shot, and every camera movement and be completely hypnotized with his world.
"Eyes Wide Shut" doesn't have the pace nor the structure of a usual mainstream movie, which is probably why it tanked. What we have here is an intimate story about marriage, infidelity, and our sexual obsessions.
The film is about an upper class married couple Bill (Cruise) a doctor and his wife Alice. It begins with the two of them going to a party hosted by Bill's friend (Sydney Pollack). During the party, Alice sees Bill flirt with a couple of young beautiful girls, while she herself dances and flirts with a mature looking man.
A fit of jealousy takes hold of Alice and the next evening while her and Bill get high, she confesses to him a time when she felt like cheating on him with another man, a specific man who she goes into great detail about. Alice goes even further saying she even had thoughts of giving up her life with Bill all for one sexual experience with this man.
The monologue Kidman has while she's explaining this is a tour de force and it's a performance that should've gotten her an Oscar nomination. The whole story sets the rest of the story in motion, as Bill can't get the thought of Alice being with this man out of his head. He's tortured by these images which cause him to go out in the streets of New York to indulge on his own sexual fantasies. This leads him to meeting a prostitute, someone he seems willing to go all with way with until he is interrupted by a phone call from his wife. He also becomes entangled in a very surreal costume shop involving an odd Russian shop owner and his young sexually active daughter. The scene in the shop is both amusing and disturbing at the same time.
Soon Bill's adventure leads him to the most dangerous and forbidding place, located in a giant mansion where the people involved all wear masks and cloaks, and sex is all very ritualistic. These were the scenes that were deemed too much for American audiences which concluded in giving them a tamer version than the Europeans, who I suppose found sex more appealing than violence. The scenes itself are some of Kubrick's most hypnotic and dreamlike bits of filmmaking. The fluid camera movement, along with the transe-like music, and slowburn editing of the shots make it seem all unreal to the eye.
The second half of the film deals more with the mystery surrounding Bill's experiences the night before. He goes back to the spots he was in the day, each one looking unlike they were before. He soon learns that his whole adventure may have lead to the murder of a woman from the house who tried to help him. AS the audiences we are as confused as Bill, we try to think that maybe what we saw was a dream he was having, after all everything seemed so unreal, could he have been responsible for the murder of this girl?
"Eyes Wide Shut" has so many things going on, at once it is about the fidelity and trust between a husband and a wife, and it's also about the dangers of following our obsessions too far until we can't go back. Ultimately the heart of the film lies with the relationship between Bill and Alice, both of them are acting out their own impulses, trying to torture the other psychologically with their sexual desires. There is love there, and in the end I was left thinking Bill and Alice actually have a stronger marriage, and Kubrick leaves us with a very memorable line from Kidman.
"Eyes Wide Shut" was the last film by Stanley Kubrick who died four months before its release. Kubrick had a very small output of films, but if you consider those that he did make, you can see they were all done by an artist who understood the medium perhaps better than anyone. It's a shame "Eyes Wide Shut" didn't receive the recognition it deserved when it was first released, the more I watch it, the more I'm entranced by it, as if I was watching a dream unfold in front of me. Kubrick's films were never based on reality, they were always surreal exhibits of emotion, and film was always the medium that fit Kubrick's sensibilities so well.
No comments:
Post a Comment