Eyes Wide Shut
Just in case you don’t believe this is truly a sex drama, it starts with the female lead undressing for a party, and ends with the word fuck. But they never do, either of them. Testicle-shrivelling attention to detail everywhere.
The basic premise is really that, a couple bicker for lack of satisfactory sex life, even thought they literally have everything they ever need. They start fantasising about being fucked by other people, then flirt with randoms at a party, maybe to provoke jealousy on the other.
Starts as they get ready for a party. Everyone lives on Park Avenue et al, they are all loaded beyond belief, but the party hosts are aristos, that’s a whole other level.
As they are kinda estranged, they don’t interact much, after a dance. He recognises the piano player from college, they talk for a while. She dances with a suave stranger who makes an indecent proposal, and he has two babes under his arm when he summoned by the host upstairs.
Some hooker was speed-balling and overdosed. The host was shirtless and pantless as he got in, and she is buck naked. The doctor saves her, she is very grateful.
They get home. After smoking some weed, they start bantering. Then the woman springs this emotional sledgehammer to his face, about a dude she casually met and would have given everything to be deep dicked by him.
He goes basically catatonic, but is saved by the bell. One of his patients died, he needs to “show his face”. Off he goes, to the wildest night of his life.
He gets to the impromptu wake, since he died in his bed, but had been sick for a while. The daughter is there, telling him she will marry in a couple months and move away, but she really loves him! Yes, she kisses him in front of his father’s dead body. Against he is saved by the bell, her fiancé arrives and he leaves.
He is already shaken, so he walks. When about town, he is shoulder checked and called a “faggot”, short, “go back to San Francisco where you belong”.
Wonders never cease, he meets an “upper class” street walker (paying for her sociology studies, it seems), and he does meet her in her cozy apartment, but gets a call from the wife asking for an ETA for his arrival, and this absolutely kills the mood. He pays her anyway and leaves, again. This time, he is also saved by the bell, but he doesn’t know it yet.
He passes a jazz bar, his pal from college is there, the guy he saw at the party earlier. He is also married with children, but in Seattle. His next gig is tonight, he plays blindfolded but took a peak at the juiciest tits he ever saw. Of course our blue balls protagonist imposes himself, by gathering “The Password”.
It’s not even that kind of party, he needs a costume. The shop owner recently changed, the new guy is there chasing away his daughter from fucking other clients (this will be important in the future). He agrees to pay usury prices for a rental cloak at this hour of the night.
He has all he needs now, so he gets there by cab, in the sticks. But the password gets him in, as promised. There, he finds an Epstein class party, something grand. The pianist was right, the tits are juicy. He arrives in the middle of some ritual with some Satan-like figure “blessing” absolute smokeshows all around.
A couple on the first floor nods at him, and he nods back, like a maniac. This is the spookiest scene of the whole film, every single person is in full mask and cloak, but he is still recognised.
Adding insult to injury, the masked woman who takes him by his hand is scared, urges him to leave. His self preservation instincts are overridden by his blue balls, so he keeps going to more and more rooms, filled with all possible kinds of depravity an debauchery. A lot of voyeurs. Furries. You name it.
He is eventually taken to the central room by security and tested for another password, and he fails. He unmasks, and is urged to disrobe, but the woman who warned him sacrifices herself for him, so he is able to get home physically unharmed.
In the next day, he keeps digging even though he is explicitly told not to, and finds the pianist was manhandled out of hotel in the middle of the night. He returns the suit, and finds the owner is pimping out his own daughter willingly now, since they forked over cash, and the good doctor could have her as well.
The hooker he almost fucked has AIDS, this kills what he had just started with the roommate. The girl who sacrificed for him is dead, he even sees her body in the morgue!
He is then summoned by the guy from the OG party, the one in the orgy, who gives him a slow paced threatening speech, not as forceful as the one in Network.
He gets home again and the wife is still dreaming about this potential betrayal. But they need to take the daughter Christmas shopping, they sneak some adult talk in the kiddie section.
There’s much more to say, for example nearly 2h here, is it a Christmas movie?
The meta cast of Nicole Kidman and the Cruiser, Hollywood’s biggest IRL couple at the time, who moved to England for 2 years to shoot this is insane. Leelee Sobiski plays the pimped daughter, always “smiling”. I did not remember Alan Cummings was in this as the hotel receptionist, he is fabulous. The pianist later directed Tár, what the actual fuck.
The meta fact that Tom Cruise is mistaken for gay twice, by the kids and the receptionist is hilarious. Keep pounding that drum.
Nearly all the film would be avoided with a “manual override”, for both, they are hysterical.
Did they really recreate a couple block of Greenwich Village to make the male lead wander about with blue balls? They reuse it as much as possible, but still, all those cars, in the middle of Pinewood. The castle and the interiors are easier to conceive, but still.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.