Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, Raphael, & Schnitzler, 1999) opens with a bespectacled Nicole Kidman carefully applying makeup and adjusting her hair. She is in evening dress, preparing for an important party. With an expression of satisfaction at the results of her efforts, and as the final touch to her toilette, she takes off her glasses. With characteristic irony, Kubrick establishes the film's dreamlike fictional reality from the outset: the characters can only “see” if their normal vision is impaired.

Eyes Wide Shut has aroused mixed audience reactions. Many who saw it in its first weeks expressed indignation that it did not deliver what was promised by its publicity. Released in July, traditionally a time for light entertainment, it had been preceded by alluring soft focus previews that suggested sexually explicit scenes between the film's glamorous stars, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. Anyone who had read the Arthur Schnitzler story of which the film is a faithful rendering would have known better, for it is not so much about sex as it is about the impossibility of the sexual relation. In other words, in the absence of a formula or matrix that assures a harmonious sexual relationship, each individual must invent one of his or her own in the form of a fantasy.

Eyes Wide Shut updates Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story to several pre-Christmas days in the contemporary lives of Dr. William Harford, a fashionable young Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise), and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman). The event that opens the film, a lavish party at the home of Harford's mentor and most important patient, is filmed with the combination of rigor and virtuosity that we have come to expect from Stanley Kubrick. The camera wanders as languorously in this scene as do its slightly drunk protagonists. Like the long tracking shots in The Shining or 2001: A Space Odyssey, the anamorphic distortion caused by the camera lens gives the scene a libidinous plasticity analogous t