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The importance of Eyes Wide Shut overtakes the scope of its theme, strong images, and casting. Kubrick uses the film as a vehicle to plant clues about cinema and directors, while at the same time scoffing at the film world with his 13th film led by Hollywood's Star Couple. The filmmaker's interest for this film goes back to 1971, when Warner Brothers announced the adaptation of the novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler as the successor to A Clockwork Orange. Even so we would have to wait until the end of the 90's for the project to take shape. It's clear that this film was premeditated for many years, and that his perfectionism did not leave any room to divert attention from his vision, as witnessed by the initially scheduled shoot of 12 weeks that took 2 years and 60-70 takes of scenes to complete. As the turning point of the film (as well as the strongest and most frightening scene), the orgy is the principal vehicle used to spread his revealing clues. First of all, Eyes Wide Shut is Kubrick's cinematic limit, going "where the rainbow ends", to offer us his pot of gold: a vision of a luxurious yet graphic perversion. He achieves an old Hollywood dream: a quasi-pornographic film directed by a respected filmmaker with Hollywood stars. The result is in fact more stoked than Caligula, a film that despite its casting and luxurious budget never broke through the limit of the establishment. Kubrick takes advantage of mocking cinematic enclaves: the most respected and marginal director in the system employing the Cruise-Kidman couple, who incarnate the glamour and blockbusters of Hollywood. In this last film, the filmmaker, (who was on the fringe for so long), claims the existence of a unique and unified cinema where, whether as an arthouse or mainstream movie, it is a cinema of quality. Eyes Wide Shut takes a look at the director's profession. When Tom Cruise arrives at the orgy, he symbolizes the job of the filmmaker and the mask he wears is the camera. The character then strolls from one room to another, as a passive voyeur who toys with the desire to be active. He visits worlds that do not belong to him, hidden behind his mask much like a filmmaker on location who films imaginary worlds. The fact that the Doctor interpreted by Cruise is always at the limit between passive and active in his flirtations with different prostitutes demonstrates that a director is never completely a stranger to what he is filming, annihilating at the same time the notion of distance between an author and his work. The character's constant dance with the forbidden denotes the hypocrisy of filmmakers who put in scenes of fantasies that that they can never satisfy in real life. Kubrick is revealed in Eyes Wide Shut. At the film's start when Cruise allows himself to be led by two young models and asks with a feigned innocence where they're taking him, they respond "Where the rainbow ends", an advertisement to the audience that Kubrick will take them to the ultimate and most extreme vision of his desire as a filmmaker and as a man. The fact that the film is this vehicle, this rainbow, is confirmed by the name of the costume shop Cruise visits later: "Rainbow". (Mere coincidences in a Kubrick film are implausible.) The director identifies with Cruise's character. While Cruise absolutely must go the "Rainbow" in order to reach the depths of his fantasy (he needs a costume to enter the orgy), Kubrick goes to his film, his "rainbow", in order to reach his own fantasies and unveil them to us. Kubrick goes even further in the denunciation of the hypocrisy of his profession and also his own, when the doctor and the prostitute kiss through their masks. With his mask (the camera) he hypocritically embraces his fantasies (what he's filming). All of these revelations are concealed under the skin of a film with the most academic of themes: jealousy and infidelity. The film is presented as a sociological case study where a perfect life cannot be fun and successful without perversion. In the first scene where Dr. Bill is in a prostitute's room in the foreground an Introduction to Sociology textbook may be found, as if introducing the case study to follow. It's not ironic that it is the prostitute and not Cruise who possesses the book. It's useless to object to the implausibility of his work, since a Kubrick film can only exist in Kubrick's universe and that his films principally serve as vehicles for his vision of the world. The film is a wide open door for the actors to gain respectability, as if Kubrick were giving a final finger to the intelligentsia that adulates him. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, more accustomed to hit films and popular press, in this film place their intimacy and salaries (during the two years of filming they refused a number of more profitable projects) as well as all of their trust in an all-powerful director. If for Nicole Kidman it's a more extreme exercise as an actor, for Cruise it's a way to destroy his image as a Golden Boy and on the same token all the roles that made him famous. As he plays his usual go-getter conqueror who has succeeded in everything, he reveals himself as even darker and more perverted under his established do-no-wrong airs. Each time that he brandishes his identification as a medical doctor in the movie with the intention of proving that he is doing nothing wrong while his only goal is to go to the orgy, it's in fact Cruise that is destroying all of the characters he has played up until this day. By claiming that he's a Doctor and therefore a good man in order to justify his darker goals, he shows us that in fact all of the characters that he has played in his career are false, that he doesn't believe in them, and he warns you not to trust them. As for other actors, from Pee Wee Herman (Paul Rubens) and Rade Serbedzija, to Leelee Sobieski, they represent the non innocent work of an actor, since by their roles and at times in their lives they have shown a tendency for what is not "correct" in our society. Whether the film has faults or not is of little importance. What counts is the work, that beyond its form as a film is the Testament in images of a Stanley Kubrick who frees himself and is naked both as Man and as a filmmaker, whose nudity is symbolized on the screen by Nicole Kidman.
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