Stanley Kubrick
Eyes Wide Shut

When we watch a Kubrick film, we already know that, unlike most of the current major studio productions, we are faced with a complex work open to various interpretations. The fact that it is a film constructed on different overlapping levels already fascinates me, and the fact that it is a Kubrick film further increases my attention, which is drawn not to the plot, but to Kubrick’s reflections on the intricate interplay between love, sex, and human passions.   Yes, because "Eyes Wide Shut" is exactly that: a reflection on themes central to most of humanity's artistic production since the beginning of art creation.   With "Eyes Wide Shut", which literally means "Eyes Wide Shut", I believe we are facing the most pornographic film about love ever. By "pornographic," I am referring to the very etymology of the word, which is to describe what cannot be shown because it is obscene.   I will try to better explain this statement starting with the film's title: the eyes are wide open on a theme against which, in the comedy of life, they prefer to remain tightly shut. That is, the impossible title already contains the key to interpreting the film, which displays the impossibility for the film’s protagonists (and here I leave it to you to decide if and to what extent you identify with them) to realize in their daily lives the ideal and "romantic" dimension of love.   Kubrick empties eroticism of the self's interferences, of the soul's interference on the body: it shows us the inability of any psychological, moral, philosophical, or religious interpretation to frame in a system of social or cultural conventions the mysterious and complex interplay that exists between love, sex, and human passions.   The film closes with a line from the female protagonist (Alice Harford played by Nicole Kidman) "The thing we should do as soon as possible is fuck" which, in my opinion, is the entire key to reading the film.   The mutual romantic deception, the mutual illusions to which the couple subjects themselves to find an "ideal" meaning suddenly disappears to make room for the only thing that seems to have a real or rather "physical" meaning: that is, sex.   With this line, Kubrick explicitly sacrifices metaphysical love on the altar of physical love.   The psychological journey that the film's protagonists undertake is within themselves: people who seem both "resolved," apparently so self-assured, so "established" in family and work, finding themselves suddenly on the brink of an abyss. The abyss of their own inner emptiness: emptiness made of darkness and absence of certainties where the only possible certainty is that man (understood as a species) is an animal no different from all others and, as such, driven to perform actions to satisfy their physical needs.   The immediate implication of achieving this awareness is to remove human actions from the mind's dominion over the body: man is no longer "sapiens," no longer a soul, but a body.     A masterpiece film. Unmissable.