This is quite the strange ending to my Kubrick watch through. A lot of people really forget about this one, or hate it. I have to say, it is a good movie but not even close to Kubrick's previous 11 films. I really wish he had started on A.I. before this one, and ended on that kind of note instead.

The first 45 or so minutes I really like. We open with seeing their marriage status, and how it can be influenced easily by their actions. I think this is the main goal of the film; to show us the complexity of marriage. What will they do to please each other? Anger each other? We find out, but certainly in a crazier way than you'd anticipate.

The story is not the problem. The main problem is pacing. After that first act, the film slows down tremendously. Not just in plot movement, but in dialogue. The people I watched with and I started making the joke early about how people always repeat each other in this film. "I think they talk too slow." "You think they talk too slow?" "I think they do." Oh, but I didn't put enough spacing between those quotes to really get you to understand the time.

This is all summed up strongly in climax scene. The dialogue is sooo slow with major spaces of silence. The actions of the characters is sooo boring and repetitive. People move just to move. It feels like a high school play. It makes no sense to me that this was shot by Kubrick. Most of the film feels like him, but this one scene really bothers me.

Hell, maybe I'm supposed to feel what Tom Cruise is feeling. I mean, I do feel like joining Scientology now.

**It doesn't matter if it's Stanley Kubrick's best or worst. It's a movie that makes you think.**

Stanley Kubrick is one of those filmmakers who didn't make a lot of films. Over the course of his forty-year career, he only made thirteen feature films. Very little... However, if we look closely, almost all of them are familiar and immediately entered the pantheon of cinema. They are not perfect films, nor was Kubrick perfect no matter how methodical he was, and there are films of his that are unpalatable (I've already written that in some of them). But each of them, for its reasons, is its own, a very different work. In this film, he makes a case study around desire, sexuality and how we, individually or as a couple, deal with it.

The script follows a doctor and his wife. An apparently happy couple who, after a party where they both flirted with other people (without consequences), have a fight where she, perhaps to take away his self-confidence, confesses that she wanted to have another man, some time ago. The revelation leaves the doctor speechless. That night, he doesn't seem to know what he wants: he desires other women, but refuses their advances. But when a pianist friend tells him about a strange party, full of beauties, where he has to play blindfolded, he wants to see it up close. Yes, the party was a gigantic chic orgy, with touches of unholy religious ritual to accentuate the sense of sin and lust. Of course, the unwary guy ends up being discovered and unmasked… and from there, the film becomes denser, with the character increasingly afraid of what might happen to him.

The film makes us think a lot about sexuality, monogamy, the importance we give to marital fidelity. I don't know what it was like in 1999, but today it's common to see couples in open relationships, or relatively discreet saunas and swing clubs that throw liberal parties with some regularity. There is still a universe apart – private parties, organized by social networks and for guests only – and it is true that the rich and famous are much more demanding with the reservation of their intimacy, especially when they do naughty things. But what the film proposes to us is, not so much the refusal of monogamy, but that we think about the way we give up all other sexual partners when we really fall in love. The notion of personal sacrifice runs through the entire film (a woman who gives up an erotic fantasy for love, another who proposes to die in order to save an innocent, a man who refuses sex because he is married) and indicates that the best bonds we create in life involve choices and sacrifices in exchange for something greater. In fact, to be happy in a marriage, you need to keep your eyes wide shut to temptations.

With a very good and well written story, the film develops the characters very well and allows us to get to know them. For that, the film doesn't mind taking a slower pace that can leave some audiences exasperated. Decisive was the choice of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman for the main roles. At the time, they were Hollywood's pretty couple, and there's no doubt that Kubrick knew how to exploit their enormous personal and intimate chemistry, transporting it to the characters and the film. In fact, this may not be Kubrick's best film (that's relative!) but, for me, it's Cruise's best film so far.

Technically, the film has many positives. Kubrick gave an almost maniacal attention to detail and took his time filming. And we can see how each scene was shot in a detailed way, with the camera moving precisely, cuts surgically made, very long and very well edited scenes, taking advantage of the excellent cinematography and sets (where, of course, the mansion of the party stands out). Even more important is the way the director was able to work with the environment and the tension, growing and almost palpable. There is a lot of nudity in this film, including frontal nudity (Kidman herself did scenes where she is practically naked) and some sex scenes that, if not explicit, are very visual. Even so, the film is not, surprisingly, very erotic. I think the director didn't want sex to distract us or cut that tension he was looking for. As for the sound and soundtrack, I think it does its job well, but I didn't find it particularly remarkable.

Eyes Wide Shut

Last work of the genius of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut shows us a New York that, despite the Christmas period, is very dark. The couple, played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, seems initially happy and carefree, until the wife does not confess to her husband her sexual temptation that she had with a young naval officer. Shaken by the events just told, Bill enters a crisis and decides to throw himself into an adventure that could bring him very serious consequences.

A film that talks about the sexual obsession of today's society, made up of every single individual who has his or her own hidden fantasies, through a maniacal symbolism (as one would expect from Kubrick) that will not be possible to identify with a single viewing of the film, and that will allow us to understand even better the true meaning of the film and even who is the man dressed in red at the party.

I would say that the highest point of the film is definitely the scene when Bill goes to the villa where there is a masked cultic party, accompanied by a disturbing soundtrack. Every single shot and dialogue present throughout the party sequence is perfect. One of the best things I've ever seen on screen.

However, I find that at a certain point, the film begins to slow down, unnecessarily lengthening the film. Some of the dialogue is superfluous, unnecessary, scenes that could very well have been shot in less time and would have had the same impact on a plot level. Let's say that the film could have easily lasted 20-30 minutes less.

But it's still an amazing film that kept my attention fixed on the screen.

8.5/10