Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick’s last film adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story, set in Vienna during carnival. Kubrick moved it to New York at Christmas and never went there. He would not fly, so Greenwich Village was rebuilt on the Pinewood backlot and the masked ritual was shot at Mentmore Towers, Elveden Hall and Highclere Castle. Filming ran past fifteen months and contained an unbroken forty six week stretch, which Guinness recorded as the longest constant movie shoot. One walk through a door took 95 takes. Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh dropped out over scheduling and were replaced by Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson. Kubrick screened the finished cut on 5 March 1999 and was dead two days later. The music under the ritual is Jocelyn Pook’s Masked Ball, built from a recording of a Romanian Orthodox liturgy played backwards. For American prints, digital figures were placed in front of the orgy so the film could carry the R rating its contract required, while the rest of the world saw the sequence unobscured. A good fit if you accept that the confession which sets the plot moving is never dramatised, only pictured by the husband in black and white inserts. Not for a viewer who wants naturalistic playing: line readings drilled across that many takes are deliberately emptied out.