EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

Well-heeled Manhattanite couple Bill and Alice go to a Christmas party thrown by their uber one-percenter friend Victor and there, in the boozy, soft light wooze, both are sexually tempted but both decline. Afterwards, sharing a post party joint, they get into an argument about potential infidelity which ends in Alice confessing that she was struck by the sight of a naval officer at a recent holiday they'd been on. Not just struck but after a single glance from him, she says she was ready to abandon her marriage for the stranger. Bill is so slammed by this that he sets off into the night looking for an opportunity to slake his jealousy by any means possible and ends up infiltrating a secret orgy of the great and famous where his life is threatened. He is saved by an interloper whose fate appears dreadfully sealed. Freed, he flees, determined to discover what happened.

Stanley Kubrick was by the time of this film's completion producing so few new films that each was given greater hype than the previous on their approach. Among the rumours sticking to this one was that it was a box office time server before the one he really wanted to make, A.I. Such rumours served to diminish Eyes Wide Shut as a secondary work made to finance a primary one. However, Kubrick had wanted to make an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream-Story) since the 1960s. It had gone through many different imaginings and castings until finally made in the 1990s. It was a primary work that Kubrick was highly pleased with. 

On the ground around me, people who professed to be lifelong fans of the director mostly expressed distaste for the movie, often exaggerating the lameness of the hyped orgy scene and considering the film a waste or their time as well as the effort it took to make. I was reminded of a lot of backlashes previously, against all kinds of things, other movies, music artists' new albums, novels and so on: Kubrick didn't make the movie they wanted so whatever this one was was angrily flushed. For my part I had been unconvinced of Kubrick's unquestioned genius but had seen something in this last one that fascinated me. To this day, I consider it one of his best and most rewatchable. This is not, I swear, my own contrariness, the film's themes of responses to jealousy feel hauntingly genuine to me, heightened by the high sheen of the visuals and gravity of the music. If I had to choose, I'd rather have this than Lolita, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket.

Why? Well, expanding on my reason given just then, I think it's one of the most accurate treatments of sexual jealousy committed to screen. Not only does it hit the disproportionate responses between the couple but neither consummates their extra marital desire. It plays and feels more like a fable than the erotic thriller it's often touted to be.  Alice, however drunk she is, resists the charms of the Hungarian lecher at the party. Bill seems on the edge of following the two models who appear like a masturbatory fantasy from the golden light of the glitz. The couple's post-event discussion about each other's moments of temptation leads to the argument and Alice's confession. That confession, while it still haunts Alice, becomes a motif for Bill, recurring throughout his adulterous trek in a series of black and white vignettes, a scene that never happened for real but is what he imagines his wife imagined and desired. He is revenging himself against a passing thought (a resonant one but still just a thought). 

I don't think that this expresses male jealousy vs female, just the likelihood of a lack of balance between people intimately involved. This story invites you to revisit the often brutal ugliness of a moment of your own jealousy and, honest viewers who were more interested in what the film before them asked of them than in what temporary approval they might find by trashing the movie in front of others, will take away a confronting candour.

Is the orgy scene lame? Compare it to the New French Extremity and the daunting boundary pushing of erotic thrillers since and, sure, it seems very slight for the participants to care too much who knew about it. That point is better expressed in the conversation Bill has toward the end with Zigler which is more about class exclusion. The suggestion that any given modern city might be by powerful narcissists might not be news to anyone but the thought of it, when given a second or two, remains a shivery horror. As to Bill, wandering the rainbow coloured sets of a very clean Greenwich Village crawling with dirty minds, he for the moment can only see opportunities that he feels the force of his will alone bestow entitlements upon him. It's as powerful an allegory for the concentration of sexual arousal as any.

While the casting of the two leads had changed greatly over the decades as Kubrick returned to the thought of this adaptation, he really knocked it out of the park by choosing alpha celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Young, talented and beautiful, Cruise and Kidman were on screens as much as they were on the covers of celebrity mags at supermarket checkouts. They were characterised as a power couple without controversy. The opening scene depicting the pair getting ready to go to the party feels completely natural and, once established, we feel we are in the company of people we know at the same time as unreachable movie stars. Cruise plays up to his walking grin persona but is also put through such strain that this appears increasingly shallow. Kidman speaks mostly in hushed tones with elongated vowels takes Alice to a point of unquestionable authority. The film's final line is hers and she delivers it with the quiet but abrupt confidence that the whole film has begged: "fuck!"