The opening credits are set to a waltz the gentleman who hits on Nicole Kidman’s character in the following scene is an elegant Hungarian the film’s iconic centerpiece, a masked ritual that turns into an orgy, seems like the sort of affair that might have titillated Gustav Klimt. Though it technically takes place in 1990s New York, the film keeps one boot planted firmly in the fin de siècle world of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. What critics saw as dated, I saw as timeless. 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. The book that I was writing was a sort of fairytale, and so was the film. I was working on a novel and rarely left my apartment. My Eyes Wide Shut addiction first took hold in the spring of 2016. Rod Dreher of the New York Post quipped that it seemed to have been made by “someone who hadn’t left the house in 30 years.” Relations between men and women, in other words, had in fact changed a lot.īut had they really? I’ve watched the movie close to a hundred times in the last two years and I’m here to tell you that it was timely then, it’s timely now, and as sad as it is to say this about the world, it may well be timely forever. “It feels creaky, ancient, hopelessly out of touch, infatuated with the hot taboos of his youth and unable to connect with that twisty thing contemporary sexuality has become,” wrote Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. One of the most consistent complaints about it was that its attitude toward sex seemed badly dated. While some critics praised it as one of the master’s greatest works, it was perceived by some as a disappointment, an underwhelming valediction from the great director, who died a few months before its release. The film they eventually collaborated on, Eyes Wide Shut, came out twenty years ago to mixed reviews.

“I don’t think so.” Raphael thought about it. “Hadn’t many things changed since 1900,” he recalled asking Kubrick, “not least the relations between men and women?” “Think so?” Kubrick replied. As Raphael later recalled in an essay for The New Yorker, he was initially skeptical. The story took place in Hapsburg Vienna Kubrick wanted to know if Raphael could adapt it into a screenplay set in contemporary New York. In 1994, Stanley Kubrick sent the screenwriter Frederic Raphael a novella about a doctor who embarks on a dark odyssey of the soul after learning that his wife has fantasized about fucking another man.

Eyes wide shut 24 minutes