Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Starring: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Synopsis: Psycho-sexual drama about guilt, passion, insecurity, jealousy... who knows, it's a Kubrik after all
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

Only Stanley Kubrik could have made a film such as this. Gorgeously shot and saturated in colours, the film meanders gradually through a world of jealousy, obsession, sexual compulsion and things far darker along the way.

No other Hollywood director could have coerced a major studio to part with the 60 million dollars or so that it cost to shoot, but then Stanley Kubrik was not just any director. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise virtually devoted a year and a half of their lives exclusively to this project. With Kubrik's death earlier this spring, what was already the most anticipated film of the entire year assumed even more relevance. Shrouded in secrecy till then, the film was finally released in July to enormous media and public interest.

However, the film flopped in the US, though many would consider that to be a good omen as the same audiences dished out wads of money for drivel like Big Daddy, Wild Wild West and The Spy Who Shagged Me. It was the Americans who ridiculed Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate into becoming one of the biggest flops of all time. But when the movie opened in Europe, it was considered a classic.

A similar fate may await Eyes Wide Shut, where an outright rejection from American audiences turns into adulation by the more refined/pretentious Europeans. At time of writing, that adulation has failed to materialize and the film is largely looked up on a a misguided last venture for an otherwise great auteur.