Category: 1999

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Stanley Kubrick | 2hr 39min

The mysterious, erotic cult that Dr. Bill Hartford infiltrates one night after a bitter argument with his wife Alice may be deeply sensual, but it can’t exactly be described as intimate. Anonymity is highly valued here, concealing the faces of its members with impassive masks even as they bare their naked bodies. Orgies are performed with ritualistic solemnity upon fine furniture, while other guests quietly watch from the sidelines of this manor’s lavish, Baroque interiors. Within the main hall too, their red-cloaked leader conducts a ceremonial prayer, chanting a deep, guttural hymn and swinging a thurible around his circle of prostrating followers. Whatever this is, Bill certainly finds it more exciting than his monogamous marriage to Alice, though playing in the realm of dreams is a dangerous game when reality inevitably beckons from the other side.

Having long been fascinated by cinema’s potential to unlock humanity’s repressed desires, Stanley Kubrick’s interrogation of matrimony and temptation finally sees him aim his camera towards the act of sex itself. It may be one of the most common human activities alongside eating and sleeping, but it is perhaps the only one to also be considered taboo, never to be spoken about in polite company. In essence, it is a secret club that we know everyone is part of, yet which also demands us to remain silent on the personal matter of our fantasies, habits, and history. As we witness when Bill is caught out and forced to remove his mask, the threat of being exposed does not simply incite shame and humiliation. It is an existential threat to our very being.

A stunning piece of production design inside the cult’s manor, laying into the warm, red palette of sensuous lustful desire while injecting a harsh sterility.
Superb blocking throughout the manor, draping fully-cloaked and naked members across each other while hiding their identities behind masks.

Fortunately, there is a woman at this party who is oddly protective of Bill, offering to take his punishment when he is put on trial in front of the entire cult. He is “redeemed,” and therefore allowed to leave with nothing but a stern warning to disregard what he has witnessed – though the urge to probe deeper into this underworld isn’t so easily ignored. How can he return to his ordinary life and marriage after glimpsing such a thrilling, earth-shattering secret?

Of course, this is not the only function Bill attends in Eyes Wide Shut. Being one of cinema’s greatest formalists, Kubrick foreshadows the cult’s covert gathering with a Christmas party in the film’s first act. Besides the wealthy host Victor Ziegler and old friend Nick Nightingale providing entertainment on keys, Bill and Alice do not know any other guests – an awkward situation that returns at the cult’s mansion where Ziegler and Nick are again the only acquaintances present in a crowd of strangers. If the masquerade is where identities are concealed and desires are freely expressed, then this soirée sees its guests put on courteous facades for the sake of social convention, while infidelity quietly simmers in flirtatious passes. That is, until Ziegler urgently summons Bill upstairs to save his mistress Mandy from an overdose, suddenly shining a harsh light on his private affairs.

The first of many beautifully lit scenes, illuminating the Christmas party with golden fairy lights, chandeliers, and coloured bulbs.

It is clearly a thin layer of decorum separating these characters’ private and public personas, even behind the closed doors of their most intimate relationships. That is where Bill’s psychosexual journey starts in Eyes Wide Shut after all, as the day after Ziegler’s party, he and Alice jealously confront each other about the strangers they flirted with. The only reason men would ever speak to women like her is to sleep with them, he asserts, while the opposite sex is simply programmed differently. This is the belief which his faith in their marriage rests upon, and so when she confesses to a fantasy that she had about another man, his fragile world is shaken.

The verbal sparring between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman here displays incredibly fierce performances from both actors, drawing from the well of natural chemistry they shared in their real-life marriage before its breakup. While the rest of Alice’s story in Eyes Wide Shut is largely confined to their apartment, jittery, monochrome hallucinations of her making love to other men continue to haunt Bill on his night-time wanderings, as he smoothly glides across rear-projected backdrops of New York’s streets.

Jittery, monochrome hallucinations manifesting Bill’s greatest insecurity.
Rear projection as Cruise wanders through New York streets, disconnecting from his surroundings as if in a dream.

Kubrick’s reappropriation of what used to be a classical Hollywood technique is carried through with avant-garde flair here, effectively lifting Cruise out his immediate environment and submerging him in a dreamlike state. The ambient, practical lighting that is carried through the film as a whole also serves to shape his ethereal world with vibrant beauty, constantly underscoring the holiday setting with sparkling Christmas trees, golden fairy lights, and decorated shop windows. When Bill ventures into a dim, moody jazz club, its array of coloured bulbs become bleary stars in the background of shots, while cool, blue washes in his apartment contrast its festive warmth with melancholic innocence.

The jazz club where Bill meets with Nick is an underworld of ethereal, ambient beauty, its lights becoming a backdrop of bleary stars.
A meticulous recreation of Greenwich Village streets despite being shot in England, maintaining the excellent use of practical lights.
The occasional cool, blue wash in Bill and Alice’s apartment contrasts its festive warmth with melancholic innocence.

Eyes Wide Shut does not evoke this cultural imagery merely for its striking aesthetic though. Like the cult’s devout worship of sex, Christmas represents the intersection of the sacred and profane. It is historically a Christian celebration, yet its pagan roots stretch even further back, while in modern-day society its spiritual significance has been entirely stripped away. Religious iconography is scarce to be found here, as Kubrick instead recognises it as an annual orgy of consumerism, encouraging us to gorge ourselves on the world’s temptations. As the final scene in the toy shop demonstrates, these may merely manifest as whimsical, material goods for children, though adults are far more likely to pursue more carnal exploits as an escape from loneliness that this time of year often brings.

Christmas represents the intersection of the sacred and profane, here stripped of religious significance and embodied purely through secular decorations.
An annual orgy of consumerism, celebrated in the commercial stores that Bill visits throughout the film.

For us too, the atmosphere that Kubrick builds is deeply intoxicating, lulling us into a trance strung together by impressionistic long dissolves and a minimalist piano motif alternating between two eerie notes. His camera is fully engaged with the movement of bodies, twirling around Alice’s amorous dance with an older Hungarian man at Ziegler’s party, and later slowing down into a steady, prying zoom as she and Bill embrace in the mirror. Moments like these often break up the cold sterility that is present in Kubrick’s detached wide shots, and thus we often find ourselves alternating between perspectives of the human body as either vessels of profound emotion, or merely an anatomical collection of organs acting on animal instinct.

Kubrick’s eye for composition did not weaken over the decades – the framing, blocking, and palette of this opening shot is a stunning formal setup for the film.
An excellent camera zoom as Bill and Alice embrace in this mirror shot, tentatively inching closer to the following consummation.
Long dissolves as dreamy transitions between scenes, shifting from intimate close-ups to wide shots.

There is no need to settle on one interpretation over the other here – Kubrick recognises that it is merely a matter of subjective versus objective perceptions, and it is frequently impossible to tell the difference. Whether he is being seduced by his patients’ daughters or going home with a prostitute, Bill is teased with sexual advances everywhere he goes, though each time he is incidentally pulled away by some other engagement. If this is a dream, then perhaps it is his subconscious mind waking him back up, pushing him back to his duties as a faithful husband and respectable doctor who must maintain a clinical relationship with the human body. He walks a very narrow line, but the fact that he never entirely throws himself into temptation even saves his life on at least one occasion, as we learn when the prostitute’s HIV diagnosis comes to light.

Temptation follows Bill everywhere he goes, yet each time he is pulled away as if waking from another dream.

More ambiguously, the treatment that Bill administered to Mandy may have also incidentally been the reason he was allowed to leave the cult’s manor unharmed, as he eventually deduces the identity of his masked saviour and receives confirmation from a man who was present – Ziegler. With that said, his secret club did not actually play any role in killing her, the cultist claims. It was all a ruse to scare Bill off, and the fatal overdose being reported in the news is merely incidental.

Whether or not Ziegler is telling the truth, it is enough motivation for Bill to abandon his investigation completely. Whatever personal issues may be present in his marriage to Alice, the risk of divorce, an STD, or even death is simply too significant to be treated with such recklessness. At the same time though, can we truly appreciate what we have in front of us if we don’t grapple with the darkness that lies on the other side?

The green hanging lights over the red billiard table – subtly evocative of the red circle in the manor’s main hall.

“Maybe I think we should be grateful,” Alice ponders in the final minutes of Eyes Wide Shut. “Grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.” After all, dreams do not belong to distant, far-flung worlds. They are closely intertwined with the actions and decisions we make every day, guiding us towards tangible futures born from primal fantasies. By carefully traversing that indistinct realm which dissipates each morning upon being touched by sunlight, Kubrick delicately reveals those depraved, shadowy figures that live inside us all, and the invisible power they hold over our minds, civilisations, and humanity.

Eyes Wide Shut is currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV and YouTube.

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Sofia Coppola | 1hr 37min

Even rarer than a director making a debut film of as high a calibre as The Virgin Suicides is a director doing so in their twenties, but then again Sofia Coppola is no ordinary filmmaker. Being raised by one of the great masters of cinema, Francis Ford Coppola, there were surely lessons passed on from one to the other, but an even more distinct image of her childhood and adolescence emerges in the closed-off, dreamlike spaces her stories unfold within, meditating on notions of celebrity, privilege, and disillusionment.

Michelangelo Antonioni might seem like a fitting comparison to draw here tonally, and yet stylistically The Virgin Suicides is more often in line with François Truffaut, playfully removing us from the immediacy of the narrative to freeze frames over character introductions, playfully opening up an ‘x-ray’ iris to peek at a pair of underwear, and dividing shots with creative split screens. With a nostalgic voiceover playing over the top of it all, a pensive yet whimsical atmosphere takes hold through which the lives of the Lisbon sisters are languidly filtered. The power they hold over the neighbourhood boys is immediately evident in the intrigue and reverence with which they are shot, like sacred mysteries to be untangled. The influence they continue to exert long after this story ends also remains clear in the narration’s wistful mythologising, speaking in first person plural without clear individuality, like an embodiment of the entire town reflecting on its own history.

Freeze frames, x-rays, split screens – Coppola is playfully inventive with her creation of this nostalgic dream-space in a very Truffaut-like manner.

As such, there is also an element of destiny which haunts this narrative like a ghost, slyly directing the sisters down a tragic path of self-destruction right from the youngest’s very first suicide attempt. Maybe their fate was spelled out from the start, but more likely is that it is simply the concoction of an unreliable narrator, imagining an aura of sacrosanctity around these girls who are put up on pedestals by both the town and their own conservative parents. As the local boys pry through one of their diaries, their imagination of its contents manifest in a graceful montage of open wheat fields, unicorns, sparklers, and close-ups of the sisters’ faces lightly flowing in dreamy long dissolves, and illuminated under the gorgeous glow of golden hour lighting. “We knew they knew everything about us, and we couldn’t fathom them at all,” the boys extol in wonder, and yet such daydreams only set them up for disappointment in those moments when that mystique briefly fades away.

Ethereality surrounding these girls in long dissolves and golden lighting, turning them into ghosts that exist in the minds of men.

The second-youngest daughter, Lux, especially begins to stand out as the source of this disenchantment. Under tight restrictions from her parents, school heartthrob Trip is given permission to take her out to the homecoming dance, though it is when the two finally make love that her allure suddenly disappears. In a beautiful day-for-night wash across the school football field, he stands up and silently walks away in the early hours of the morning before she wakes up. “I liked her a lot, but out there on the field… It was just different then,” an older vision of Trip reflects, still unable to properly sort through his feelings though clearly no longer under the spell still possessing so many of his friends. Though he has found the heart of the legend, the only riches he has discovered is a real, vulnerable human.

A stunning blue day-for-night wash across the football field the morning after Lux loses her virginity, bringing with it a delicate melancholy.

And then there is Mr and Mrs Lisbon, whose reactions against having their image of their daughters ruined manifest far more severely than mere indifference. Their home becomes a prison, and perhaps here that aforementioned Antonioni influence does manifest in Coppola’s framing of the sisters within tight spaces and behind staircase bannisters. Outside, a time lapse of the house shows no one going in or out, and yet the boys continue to watch from across the street, plotting ways to contact and rescue the trapped girls. There is little these sisters can do to take control of their own narratives, especially as they brought to national attention in news stories more than once, further propagating the mythology they would much rather shed.

The claustrophobic architecture and blocking is on Coppola’s mind in this final, crushing act.

One has to wonder whether such obsessions would exist at all had these parents not locked their daughters down so tightly, thereby creating the illusion of great treasures hiding behind closed doors. In the sleepy, yellow radiance that bathes this small, 1970s Michigan town in the sentimentality of memory, Coppola might initially seem to be participating in the tender worship of these young girls. It is in those moments where she sees them as flawed beings though that they are brought back down to earth, transforming the film’s affectionate fascination into a poignant recognition of pain, longing, and overwhelming grief.

These images of perfection brought down to earth, and yet also ironically preserved forever as wistful memories.

The Virgin Suicides is currently streaming on Stan, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Topsy-Turvy (1999)

Mike Leigh | 2hr 40min

W.S. Gilbert is the intelligent dramatist, reciting his lyrics like light poetry. Sir Arthur Sullivan is the musical genius, directing his cast with his sense of rhythm, pitch, and dynamics. With one expressing himself through words and the other through jaunty, musical tunes, the two aren’t always speaking the same language, and conflict frequently arises. But when they are finally in sync, creativity flows uninhibited, and inspiration strikes without warning. This is especially the case when Sullivan visits an exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts, where he has an epiphany to write what would become one of their greatest musicals – The Mikado. This fruitful period of the duo’s partnership is the historical canvas upon which Mike Leigh grafts reflections of his own creative processes in Topsy-Turvy, drawing together artists, egos, and aristocrats in this world of splendour and sensitivity.

It is incredibly refreshing to see Leigh lavish such opulently stylistic expressions all over a film which belongs to a genre so frequently confined to stale templates, and often stripped of unique directorial voices. The best artist biopics in some way reflect the eccentricities of their subjects, and when Gilbert and Sullivan just so happen to be the points of interest, opportunities to present extravagant set pieces and musicals are abundant. Leigh does indeed make the most of such scenes where we watch the duo’s theatrical visions erupt in patterns of reds, greens, and golds across the stage, with the sumptuous décor of pink cherry blossoms and Japanese architecture adorning the space, but at the same time, his sights are set far beyond the products of their virtuoso, brilliant as they are. There is beauty to be found all through their journey of creation, from the gorgeous wallpaper splashing bold colours up against the backdrops to their lowest points, to the dramatic dolly in on Gilbert’s face during his stroke of inspiration, and right down to the exacting rehearsals, where both frustration and humour is present in the actors’ repetitions of their scripted lines.

It isn’t hard to find compositions as beautiful as this one – a delicate framing of the actors through the drapes of the canopy bed.
Leigh shows off his painter’s eye in his rich use of colours to frame his characters.

And then, as if to push its ambitions even further, Topsy-Turvy continues to expand its scope beyond Gilbert and Sullivan’s focused efforts, becoming an ensemble piece that gives full credit to the collaboration of multiple minds as necessary factors in this creative process. It is certainly worth acknowledging Jim Broadbent’s performance as Gilbert as one of his best, but the collective power of every other supporting and minor character has just as much of an impact, with each of them, from Andy Serkis’ pipe-puffing choreographer, John D’Auban, to Timothy Spall’s self-conscious performer, Richard Temple, getting the chance to make their presence known.

The Robert Altman comparison is inevitable here, especially given Leigh’s adoption of his directorial method of guiding actors through improvisations, thereby letting character relationships organically emerge from seemingly insubstantial discussions. He spends full scenes fixating on whether or not actor Durward Lely shall wear a corset beneath his kimono, the wage negotiations of another actor, George Grossmith, and the attempts from the show’s “three little maids” to imitate the walks of authentic Japanese women. In heavier moments, the depictions of alcoholism, drug abuse, and health issues tie the film to its setting of Victorian London, where even the wealthiest folk aren’t completely immune to the economic and social ills of the era.

Leigh commits to his ornate backdrops even outside the theatre and homes, showing off these deep red walls at the dentist.
Again, even more splendid use of wallpaper to build out this world of Victorian England, matching it to the bedsheets and robe.

And yet these hardships and petty arguments do little to separate these artists when they collectively approach Gilbert in a bid to convince him not to cut Temple’s main song, “A More Humane Mikado”. Even through such trials, their effort in restoring confidence in their friend and colleague is abundantly sweet, but it also importantly underscores the value of collaboration and sacrifice in the dramatist’s own approach to the creation of art.

With Leigh placing such an emphasis on cooperation in the production of The Mikado, it is only right to similarly give credit to his own talented team, made up of his regular cinematographer, Dick Pope, his costume designer, Lindy Hemming, and Eve Stewart, whose specialty in period production design rightfully earned her an Academy Award on this film. There is no doubting that Topsy-Turvy is an extraordinary expression of Leigh’s visionary voice, examining his own ideas of how great art comes together. And yet in the gloriously lavish interiors, the depth of the ensemble’s talents, and the painstaking detailing of each of these characters’ intricate emotional journeys, the film becomes an ode from everyone who worked on it, dedicated to those artists who can put aside their egos to share in the joy of mutual creation.

Always this extraordinary dedication to the mise-en-scéne, as Leigh hangs on this lovely symmetrical shot of the dinner table for over a minute.

Topsy-Turvy is currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel.

Ratcatcher (1999)

Lynne Ramsay | 1hr 34min

The Glaswegian streets of Ratcatcher are infested. Rats, garbage bags, even children, who themselves are crawling with nits – this working-class suburb of Scotland is a plague-ridden, inescapable hellhole. Especially with the garbage men on strike, such scourges only continue to spread like a cancer, until they simply become extensions of everyone’s homes. Plastic bags of rubbish turn into sofas, and chasing rats becomes a hobby for those disillusioned youths with nothing else to do. Lynne Ramsay’s vision of blue-collar Scotland in the 1970s is evocative of a bygone era of childlike innocence, but to call it nostalgic by any means would be a stretch.

The garbage bags of Ratcatcher growing in number, ridden all through Ramsay’s mise-en-scène.

Even though the free-flowing, lyrical editing and structure of Ratcatcher does evoke a pacing not unlike Terence Davies’ autobiographical tribute to the British working class, Distant Voices, Still Lives, it has far more in common with the Italian neorealist films of the 1940s and 50s. James Gillespie is the 12-year-old boy who is introduced as the vessel through which we experience this world, and yet despite his age, he does not stand as a beacon of innocence. Any chance that that might be the case is stripped early on when he inadvertently commits a devastating act that weighs heavy on his soul, instilling in him such an unbearable guilt that only feeds his desire to escape this dreary, infested world that promises nothing but decay.

As for what brings about this deterioration, Ramsay doesn’t position James as so much of a victim as he is one of many agents perpetuating society’s slow, repulsive descent into corruption and squalor. Just a few days ago, his conscience was unmarked, and in his suffering, he could at least place the blame on his environment. Now, he is as good as one of those rats, spreading disease and filth wherever he goes. In this self-identification, he displays much empathy for the loathsome vermin overrunning the streets of Glasgow, who surely dream of some faraway utopia, just as he does.

Breaks of magic realism in this otherwise gritty, neorealist narrative.

As Ramsay has proven in the years since this debut, she is primarily a director who finds her film in the editing room, crafting montages that offer a tint of hypnotic delicacy to otherwise harsh environments. It is particularly in three brief, escapist interludes where she breaks the heavy realism of Ratcatcher to allow her characters some indulgence in a magical realist fantasy, and lets the film disappear into the light rhythms of her cutting. There aren’t a great deal of picturesque images to be found in this film, as Ramsay is clearly more committed to the rundown architecture of the setting, and yet in these moments of wonder she finds the time to linger on a window frame opening up onto a field of wheat, or in the melancholy conclusion, sitting with a body hanging in stasis beneath the surface of a murky canal.

Ramsay finding a charming frame within this window, far away from the garbage bags and rats of the city.

In this suffocating imagery, Ramsay calls back to the opening shot of James wrapping himself up in a curtain in slow-motion. In her persistent motif of infested landscapes, burying oneself deeper into the all-consuming anathema is often the only practical way one might dull one’s senses to it. Sure, there is always the dream of finally floating away to some paradise on the moon, or moving away to a brand-new, upper-class estate. But in the agonising existence of Scotland’s lower classes, Ratcatcher recognises the disheartening disparity between such pipe dreams and reality.

A return to paradise, once again caught through a window.

Ratcatcher is currently streaming on Mubi Australia.