If you’re a real film buff, you recognize the name of this film, because it is also the name of the 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler that was adapted by Stanley Kubrick into Eyes Wide Shut. This film is another auteur’s take on the very same story.
High-society couple’s marriage is tested when the husband discovers a secret erotic society and attends a masked ball, ignoring warnings of potential consequences, after his wife admits having fantasies about another man.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to remake a Kubrick film, even a weaker one like Eyes Wide Shut, so this writer-director doesn’t lack cojones, but I’m not sure a Kubrick remake is the right choice for somebody whose previous writer/director credits include films called Zombiedämmerung (2005) and Deathcember (2019).
There are so many things wrong with this film:
For one, the director repeated the one gigantic mistake that Kubrick made with Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick brought the story out of gaslit Vienna and into modern New York, where it made no sense.
(1) In the days before telephone and electrification, the main character could have grave doubts about whether the missing piano player was really alive, and those doubts would make him fear for his own life. In modern times, the main character could simply call the piano player in Seattle, to see whether the secret society had made him disappear.
(2) In the period between the wars, it was easy to understand the psychological trauma caused by the wife’s fantasy infidelity. Arthur Schnitzler, like his friend Sigmund Freud, dissected the nightmares of “fin de siècle” Vienna and his own generation – their disappointed desires for love, their secret erotic fantasies, and their fears that life would inevitably culminate in depression. In today’s world, such a confession to a highly educated man of science would not be likely to precipitate such an extreme reaction or, for that matter, much of a reaction at all. If you tell me my wife has romantic thoughts about other men, my reaction is “Of course she does. What woman doesn’t?”
The point here is that this film could have fixed all of Kubrick’s gaps in logic by simply returning the story to the spooky cobblestone streets of gaslit Vienna, and the auteur could have, with that stroke, established that he could think for himself. Instead, he chose to double down on the modern story. If you’re going to remake Kubrick, you better come up with a new take or a different angle, as Adrian Lyne did with Lolita, but there is no fresh take here.
And then there are all the things Kubrick did well, and they were plentiful, that could not be replicated. Eyes Wide Shut’s composition is extraordinary, the colors are exquisite, the lighting is perfect, the camera motion is consistently imaginative. Do you think you can come close to that in a low-budget quickie? What would make you try?
Next, there is the casting. The main character is supposed to be sort of an innocent who finds himself out of his league in the creepy sex cult. In this case, Nikolai Kinski seemed a lot creepier than the evil sex dudes. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. In this metaphor, the ever-creepy Klaus Kinski is the tree.)
Finally, it’s a German movie, made in Germany, from a German writer/director, adapted from a German-language novel about Vienna, relocated to Berlin.
So, guess what language it’s in.
How many of you guessed correctly that the answer is English?
Wow. This woman is a smoke show.
Her previous movie, “BROKE. ALONE. A kinky love story (2024)” looks very entertaining as well. There is a cap from it on imdb of her just wearing paint.
Thanks for the heads up.
PR