@Courtesy of Warner Bros.
On September 1st, 1999, I attended the press screening of the Venice Film Festival opening movie. The Artistic Director Alberto Barbera had selected one of the most anticipated movies of the year, Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
I became a movie lover when I was around twelve, the day I watched for the first time A Clockwork Orange. Before that age, I had already watched tons of feature films. Still, Stanley Kubrick’s controversial adaptation of the novel written by Anthony Burgess made me fully aware of the difference between entertainment and art when applied to movies.
After that, thanks to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket (which I saw in a theater when I was 14), and Paths of Glory, their director became not only my favorite but someone I started worshiping. Even today to me Stanley Kubrick’s filmography doesn’t have a “before” or an “after”: there is no one who in some way inspired him or could anticipate his cinema, and neither is there another director who can be compared to what he achieved with his movies. Stanley Kubrick is simply out of space and time, he can’t be reduced in any category that the history of movies works with.
The psychological and emotional state I approached Eyes Wide Shut on that September 1st, 1999 was that of a film critic feeling he was going to approach a pivotal moment in his life. On March 7th of the same year, Kubrick died at the age of 70 in his mansion close to London. This would have been his last movie, his testament to the world. Since his sudden departure there had been a lot of speculation about whether he had been able to complete Eyes Wide Shut.
What were we going to see then in Venice? His whole interpretation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story (Traumnovelle in German) or a work-in-progress from a director who had become a legend, especially because of his perfectionism? I would receive my answer to this question more than ten years later, in a way that I would never have dreamed of in my entire life…
@Courtesy of Warner Bros.
I watched Eyes Wide Shut for the first and only time on that September 1st. After 25 five years to me, it was and still is enough. Or maybe it’s just my way of coping with the idea that there wouldn’t have been any more new movies by Stanley Kubrick. So much time has passed, but I still am not sure I can accept it. Something truly came to an end on that day, probably in a way that contemporary cinema hasn’t fully understood. What I felt at the end of the screening is that Eyes Wide Shut, no matter if completed or not, was without any doubt his stunning legacy: some of the most profound and shaking themes that Kubrick developed in his previous movies are explored in this one with a different perspective: the idea of how the human mind can derail when related to a specific, oppressing microcosm; the concept of an estranged reality, when filtered by the human experience, meaning an entire range of emotions and manipulation driven by desire, lust, frustration, alienation, and other primitive instincts that civilization can’t always control; the fact that to handle our darkest drives, we need to wear the mask of normality, but when that same world we relate to breaks its surface, we can’t hide anymore the monsters who live inside ourselves.
Eyes Wide Shut is all of this, there are strong and visible links primarily to The Shining, but also to A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Lolita, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. As always, Kubrick created a masterpiece of cinema that works like the perfect stage for observing human deviations. His style of directing and editing can be considered “Brechtian” in many ways, a distant and non-participating point of view, a look into a staged set where actors must play their characters in a non-naturalistic way, showing as strongly as possible that they are puppets, no matter what victims of forces way more powerful and unstoppable than their logic or will.
And Eyes Wide Shut brings all of this at its maximum exposition: the completely fake New York, the incredible set decorations and costumes, the glamorous cinematography by Larry Smith. In this universe of deception and mysterious identities, Tom Cruise plays a man who moved by his inner, maybe forbidden drives, tries to navigate an unknown, seducing but menacing universe. Same as the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the playboy soldier of Barry Lyndon, the writer in The Shining or Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket.
The difference with Eyes Wide Shut is that Kubrick himself has changed in the twelve years that passed from his previous Full Metal Jacket. He still wants to expose and investigate all these topics and issues but seemingly in a more joyful way, showing here and there the irony, the dark comedic side of both characters and situations. To prove this, the very last line of Eyes Wide Shut played by Nicole Kidman, which (no spoiler!) in my opinion turns the entire movie into a hypnotizing comedy.
How far would we go to know our deepest and most private sexual dreams? Where do we need to draw a line separating common morality from desire? Do we live in a society that allows us to satisfy or curb our libido? In the end, Kubrick’s movie answers these questions in the most basic and natural way, demonstrating perhaps that this genius intended to play a little bit with our minds, making fun of us as much as of himself. It takes an enormous amount of talent and vision to do it through a movie like Eyes Wide Shut. No one else could have done it that way, that is for sure. We should keep looking at Stanley Kubrick’s entire filmography like a puzzle to be solved, and this movie is definitely its last piece.
At the beginning of 2009, I was working as an author/editor at Coming Soon Television, a channel entirely dedicated to movies and entertainment. One afternoon in late January my editor-in-chief Mauro Donzelli asked me to meet in the conference room, where he told me I was going to fly to London in a few days: the company had just closed a deal for a video interview with Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan (Christiane’s brother and Stanley Kubrick’s executive producer since A Clockwork Orange).
I was going to shoot a one-hour TV special about Kubrick that would be broadcast on the tenth anniversary of his death. The day after I landed in London my producer Maria Letizia Maiavacca, a cameraman whose name I unfortunately don’t remember (sorry my friend!) and I drove to Childwickbury Manor, the house Kubrick had bought in 1978.
We shot the video interviews with Mr. Harlan and Mrs. Kubrick inside Stanley’s private library, a place where very few film critics or journalists have ever been. The atmosphere was simply incredible, with the soft light illuminating red bookcases all over the four walls, filled with books of any sort. There we shoot for about three hours, talking with Mrs. Kubrick about the personal side of her husband and with Mr Harlan about his moevies. There he confirmed once and for all that Stanley Kubrick completed Eyes Wide Shut just a few days before dying.
When the interviews were completed, we left the room through an aisle where some of the masks used for the movie were hung on the walls. Still today I sense that that brief walk, which I tried to make last as long as possible, was to me a symbolic goodbye to Eyes Wide Shut and Stanley Kubrick, the artist who, for the first and deepest way, contributed to the shaping of my life.
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Here’s the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut: