Volume 46, Number 13 · August 12, 1999
Kubrick's Strange Love
By Louis Menand
Eyes Wide Shut
a film by Stanley Kubrick
Eyes Wide Shut, the thirteenth and last feature film directed by Stanley Kubrick, who died on March 7, is based on Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, which was published in 1926. Schnitzler's story is set in turn-of-the-century Vienna and Kubrick's movie is set in contemporary New York City, but otherwise the adaptation is pretty faithful. A successful doctor and his wife, happily married and with a young daughter, go to a party one evening where they are flirted with, separately, by attractive strangers. The doctor, at one point, is called away by the host to minister to a young, naked woman who has overdosed in an upstairs bathroom. When the doctor and his wife get home they discover that the experience has aroused a sexual passion that had become semi-dormant, and their renewed intimacy inspires the wife to confess to an intense but unconsummated infatuation with a man she had glimpsed briefly at a vacation spot the previous summer.
Review, 2531 words
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