EYES WIDE SHUT PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Michel Chion | 96 pages | 15 Apr 2008 | British Film Institute | 9780851709321 | English | London, United Kingdom What I Learned After Watching Eyes Wide Shut Times Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut'' is like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided. For its hero, who spends two nights wandering in the sexual underworld, it's all foreplay. He never actually has sex, but he dances close, and holds his hand in the flame. Why does he do this? The easy answer is that his wife has made him jealous. Another possibility is that the story she tells inflames his rather torpid imagination. The film has the structure of a thriller, with the possibility that conspiracies and murders have taken place. It also resembles a nightmare; a series of strange characters drift in and out of focus, puzzling the hero with unexplained details of their lives. The reconciliation at the end of the film is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a married couple who move in rich Manhattan society. In a long, languorous opening sequence, they attend a society ball where a tall Hungarian, a parody of a suave seducer, tries to honey-talk Alice "Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love? Meanwhile, Bill gets a come-on from two aggressive women, before being called to the upstairs bathroom, where Victor Sydney Pollack , the millionaire who is giving the party, has an overdosed hooker who needs a doctor's help. At the party, Bill meets an old friend from medical school, now a pianist. The next night, at home, Alice and Bill get stoned on pot apparently very good pot, considering how zonked they seem , and she describes a fantasy she had about a young naval officer she saw last summer while she and Bill were vacationing on Cape Cod: "At no time was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me, only for one night, I was ready to give up everything Bill leaves the house and wanders the streets, his mind inflamed by images of Alice making love with the officer. And now begins his long adventure, which has parallels with Joyce's Ulysses in Nighttown and Scorsese's "After Hours,'' as one sexual situation after another swims into view. The film has two running jokes, both quiet ones: Almost everyone who sees Bill, both male and female, reacts to him sexually. And he is forever identifying himself as a doctor, as if to reassure himself that he exists at all. Kubrick's great achievement in the film is to find and hold an odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone for the doctor's strange encounters. Shooting in a grainy high-contrast style, using lots of back-lighting, underlighting and strong primary colors, setting the film at Christmas to take advantage of the holiday lights, he makes it all a little garish, like an urban sideshow. Bill is not really the protagonist but the acted-upon, careening from one situation to another, out of his depth. Kubrick pays special attention to each individual scene. He makes a deliberate choice, I think, not to roll them together into an ongoing story, but to make each one a destination--to give each encounter the intensity of a dream in which this moment is clear but it's hard to remember where we've come from or guess what comes next. My Eyes Wide Shut addiction first took hold in the spring of I was working on a novel and rarely left my apartment. The book that I was writing was a sort of fairytale, and so was the film. 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. What critics saw as dated, I saw as timeless. Bill Harford. She falls to her knees laughing, then reveals that she was once so taken with a hot sailor that she fantasized about giving up their marriage and even their daughter for a single night with the guy. And to critics, that registered as bizarrely unrealistic. Could any man really be as innocent as Dr. Well, yes. By then, MeToo was in full swing, and a lot of men had been named. Like other women I know, I was overwhelmed, not by the fact that there were so many bad men out there — that was to be expected. I knew that Dr. Harford would be shocked, too. Both attitudes stemmed from an inability to understand the interior life of women and a refusal to acknowledge that we might be experiencing sexual thoughts and feelings so foreign to their own. Eyes Wide Shut reveals new truths with each viewing. Sean Fennessey. A film so willing to explore the limitations of masculinity, the limitations of heterosexuality, and the limitations of what fantasy looks like for a man who has none, is a decidedly interesting, and queer, work with which to end one's filmmaking career. Juan Barquin. This is not the steamy sexual extravaganza we have been promised, but it is provocative. In its own tormented way, Eyes Wide Shut is a valentine to monogamy. Sara Voorhees. Top Box Office. More Top Movies Trailers. Certified Fresh Picks. Black Mirror: Season 5. Into The Dark: Season 2. Lovecraft Country: Season 1. The Mandalorian: Season 1. Saturday Night Live: Season Orphan Black: Season 5. Watchmen: Season 1. The Walking Dead: Season Certified Fresh Pick. 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Submit By opting to have your ticket verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie. How did you buy your ticket? View All Photos Movie Info. After Dr. Bill Hartford's Tom Cruise wife, Alice Nicole Kidman , admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head. Stanley Kubrick. May 19, Tom Cruise Dr. William Harford. Nicole Kidman Alice Harford. Sydney Pollack Victor Ziegler. Marie Richardson Marion. Rade Serbedzija Mr. Eyes Wide Shut () - IMDb Kubrick himself went on record before passing away that he felt the film was the strongest work in his legendary career. But that doesn't change what an arduous production the film turned out to be. Because of Kubrick's infamous perfectionism and fastidious attention to detail, Eyes Wide Shut took a staggering days to complete filming. The month film shoot forced delays on Cruise and Kidman's subsequent film projects, which included Mission: Impossible 2 and Practical Magic. Another primary reason the filming of Eyes Wide Shut lasted so long is due to Cruise and Kidman signing open-ended contracts prior to production. The clause stipulated that the two actors remain at Kubrick's beck and call until he no longer needed them. As such, Cruise and Kidman took actor Vincent D'Onofrio's advice, who told them to rent a house or apartment in the UK because of Kubrick's snail-pace. The narrative thrust of the movie concerns Bill Cruise and Alice's Kidman struggle to remain faithful to one another. To help get the real-life married couple to portray onscreen distrust, Kubrick resorted to a few sneaky tricks. To exacerbate the tension and foment jealousy need for the character, Kubrick disallowed Cruise and Kidman from sharing notes on set. During one scene, Kubrick had Kidman strike erotic poses with a male model for six days of filming while barring Cruise from the set. The final cut of the film includes roughly one-minute of the footage shot. The infamous orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shut , which was omitted from all promotional materials for the film, was shot in Mentmore Towers in the UK. The property is owned by the powerful and highly influential Rothschild family. Conspiracy theorists argue that Kubrick had never been shy about ratings A Clockwork Orange was originally given an X-rating. The placement of the eight pointed Star of Venus is again undoubtedly purposeful. Conspiracy theorists have also dove upon the fact that on the official movie poster, Alice played by Nicole Kidman shows one eye, representing the illuminated eye, which we must take to mean that she is aware, enlightened. Just as things are heating up, Alice interrupts the encounter with a phone call, again seeming to have a sixth sense about things.