Though it technically takes place in 1990s New York, the film keeps one boot planted firmly in the fin de siècle world of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. What critics saw as dated, I saw as timeless. With its dreamy music and strangely mannered dialogue, its Christmas lights twinkling in scene after scene, it would fast track me into a trancelike state of creativity, detaching me from the real world and its mundane concerns. The book that I was writing was a sort of fairytale, and so was the film. I was working on a novel and rarely left my apartment. My Eyes Wide Shut addiction first took hold in the spring of 2016.
EYES WIDE SHUT 24 MINUTES MOVIE
Rod Dreher of the New York Post quipped that it seemed to have been made by “someone who hadn’t left the house in 30 years.” Relations between men and women, in other words, had in fact changed a lot.īut had they really? I’ve watched the movie close to a hundred times in the last two years and I’m here to tell you that it was timely then, it’s timely now, and as sad as it is to say this about the world, it may well be timely forever. “It feels creaky, ancient, hopelessly out of touch, infatuated with the hot taboos of his youth and unable to connect with that twisty thing contemporary sexuality has become,” wrote Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. One of the most consistent complaints about it was that its attitude toward sex seemed badly dated. While some critics praised it as one of the master’s greatest works, it was perceived by some as a disappointment, an underwhelming valediction from the great director, who died a few months before its release. The film they eventually collaborated on, Eyes Wide Shut, came out twenty years ago to mixed reviews.
“I don’t think so.” Raphael thought about it. “Hadn’t many things changed since 1900,” he recalled asking Kubrick, “not least the relations between men and women?” “Think so?” Kubrick replied. As Raphael later recalled in an essay for The New Yorker, he was initially skeptical. The story took place in Hapsburg Vienna Kubrick wanted to know if Raphael could adapt it into a screenplay set in contemporary New York. There’s a lot more to go into there which I will hold off for now, but what are everyone’s thoughts on this masterpiece of a film?Perhaps it needs to be viewed forwards and backwards at the same time.In 1994, Stanley Kubrick sent the screenwriter Frederic Raphael a novella about a doctor who embarks on a dark odyssey of the soul after learning that his wife has fantasized about fucking another man. There’s a lot more to go into there which I will hold off for now, but what are everyone’s thoughts on this masterpiece of a film? One party seems positive and the other is more sinister. Nick is playing piano at both parties and he is led away by someone at the X-max party and led away by someone at the masked party (while wearing a blindfold…again, eyes wide shut). Then the Christmas party is an exact inversion of the Masked party. But they are not focused on the child who is (depending on what you believe) allegedly kidnapped. Tom and Nicole have a good connection and she says something like “we’re awake now”. The child is in the arms of the babysitter safe. In the beginning Nicole Kidman’s asks Tom Cruise how she looks and Tom says she looks good without even looking (hence “eyes wide shut”) they are just going through the motions and not even really aware of each other and don’t have a strong connection. Then I realized the beginning of the movie is an exact inversion of the ending of the film.
when I first watched the beginning I thought ‘why would Kubrick even show this part?’ (Tom and Nicole getting ready for the party) It’s a pretty boring scene and why wouldn’t Kubrick just start the movie with them entering the party? One thing I noticed about the beginning of the film.
I know there’s a lot of different theories, theories about kidnapping, theories about the 24 mins that were cut, etc.