Film
Eyes Wide Shut + short
- Director
- Stanley Kubrick
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 159 mins
Loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, the late Stanley Kubrick‘s final film is a mesmerising, dream-like study of the delicious attractions and lurking dangers of sexual fantasy. After flirting at a formal Christmas party, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) have a stoned argument about each other’s capacity for fidelity, during which Alice reveals a fantasy she has about a young naval officer. Piqued by this, Bill embarks upon a dream-like odyssey in which all the women he meets are sexually available. Kubrick believed that if one could create the perfect blending of images and sound, the implicit meaning of a scene would somehow bypass the audience’s rational mind and pierce straight to their unconscious. The staging, lighting and sound in the film’s celebrated orgy scene comes closest to this, but once it’s interrupted the quivering tension so brilliantly sustained up to this point dissipates, as the focus shifts towards a more conventional thriller plot.
This 20th anniversary screening also includes the new retrospective documentary short Never Just a Dream: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut.
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