The film is a meditation on sexuality and how it relates to marriage, death, and money. It’s a fascinating commentary on modern life, and a rare movie that dares to examine sex as impassionately as any other issue.
Is this movie about sex? Yes, it is, but more importantly it is about people. The sex part is simply a product thereof. This is one of the most disturbingly honest portraits of human behavior and motivations ever made. The most honest I’ve ever seen, at least. To be put simply: It is about sex because people are about sex.
Her high points: the argument with her husband that ends by setting the film’s plot in motion perfectly captures the way women lure men into arguments when the cause for one is nonexistent (and on Cruise’s part, how men can’t think fast enough to do anything about it), and her dream confession scene, in which she wakes laughing but becomes tearful during recollection.
Stanley Kubrick was tempted to do “Eyes Wide Shut” in 1970, but Christianne, his wife, felt that her marriage could be in jeopardy, so she implored him not to do it… But “Eyes Wide Shut” came to be after all, the last temptation of Kubrick…
The famous mirror love scene, between Alice and her husband, reflected a missing sexual desire between them both… William was kissing his lovely wife on the neck while her glance seemed weary and tired… It seems that the eroticism has vanished from her boring life… Only a little intimate contact is left… Is she truly recognizing a necessity for a change, maybe for a new husband much more nearby…
Looking for a certain sexual vengeance, Alice begins irritating her husband about adultery by testing his immunity, and relating some fantasy she had with a handsome naval officer last summer, she assures William that ‘if the handsome office had wanted her,’ she would have sacrificed everything, even her marriage and her child for one night stand!
With shades of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Kubrick starts to play, at this point, with his characters… He seems escorting them and leading the audience for some purpose, for one definite performance he prepared his whole picture for it… Kubrick did not create a film about sex… He made a film about the conception of sex… He wanted us to explore something inside our mind that we usually prefer not to discover… Through his eyes a visual work appeared, a cinematic technique breathtakingly beautiful, a perfectionism, precise and mystical…
“Eyes Wide Shut” is a mirror, audaciously obsessive in its dazzling revelations, profound, provocative and passionate, transmitted in a frame of sex, fear and death, that we have to see with wide eyes fully opened.