On Kubrick's couch

Rating: 9/10 (17 April 2020)

"Eyes Wide Shut". What a brilliant engagement in the subject, not giving me the occasion to hesitate on a wasted Monday. Finally, I let myself plunge into Kubrick's legacy.
One thing that took all of my admiration was the lucidity in his definition of fantasm.
The story is simple: a dull couple is tortured by the sudden appearance of fantasm in their marriage. On one side, Bill, an ordinary American, wanders around New York, looking for sexual eccentricities. On the other, Alice, slowly deserts her married life for passionate oneiric meetings with the master of her heart.
However, their fantasies turn out to be too high (or too far somewhere), in reality Bill and Alice always found themselves rejected by their desires (Bill face death every time he gets near to his sexual ambitions and Alice's sweet dreams are in fact nightmares). Kubrick demonstrates the state of dissatisfaction inherent in sex when it's imagined, when the fantasy expresses deeper repressed desires or scars (Alice's self esteem for exemple). This way of Kubrick to travel between the layers of reality or the mind, on screen, made the experience remarkably terrifying. Watching "Eyes Wide Shut" isn't only entertainment, it's taking part to some kind of cinematic reflection on perception (hence the oximoron wide/shut about vision in the title).
In fact, what I also found astonishing in the movie was the thriller form (heavy silences, melodic rhythms, a dark gothic setting of NY) that was very well handled. Indeed, fear (rather than sympathy) accompanied the plot in a way that unveiled the purposes or spirit of the film. The thriller setting almost becomes a story by itself, along to the main subject (which is fantasy), for them to collide and produce reactions within the viewers or the characters (notice the reversal provoked by the mask lying on the marital bed). The movie is incisive, from stage to audience.
"Eyes Wide Shut", a beautiful and living analysis of psychosexuality. Anything as predictable as taking us into the heads of characters, but the mixture of elements fitting together and Kubrick's genius = grotesque, occultism, libertinism, death, denunciation, mystery, depression, love, desire, jealousy, dream, marriage, and anything else you notice. Us, viewers are the last element of the experiment. Our eye-opening journey innocently starts with the title, "Eyes Wide Shut", and involves us in an adventure full of discernment.