Stanley Kubrick's posthumous opus, twelve years after his previous one, with an off-puttingly grainy, gritty, speckly image. It is not hard to believe he had wanted to make it for a long, long time. There's a moldy Sexual Revolution air about it that dates it by a good two or three decades. The fact that it was "inspired by" a much earlier literary work, a mid-Twenties Freudian novella of Arthur Schnitzler's (a Viennese or Vienneseque waltz is spun around on the soundtrack in acknowledgment of the source), only puts it at home with the passé fad for European skinflick adaptations of library tomes such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, Zola's Nana, Dumas's Camille, Pierre Louys's Aphrodite. (Roger Vadim's modestly fleshy remake of La Ronde, from a Schnitzler stage piece, came too near the dawn of the Revolution to set the pace.) Of course Kubrick's contribution to the canon, aside from coming to it so late, turns out to be a far cry from the major-star, major-director hardcore sex film which the rumor mill had suggested he once hoped to make -- and which his script collaborator on Dr. Strangelove, Terry Southern, had fantasized about in his novel Blue Movie. The hero's night-long odyssey through the sexual Hades of modern Manhattan never really heats up, even when it takes him to that staple of the De Sadean daydream, the orgy at an isolated country estate: complete with mock-religious incense, chant, and organ, a very fine collection of creepy Venetian carnival masks (these inevitably call to mind the vampires' masked ball in the Hammer horror, Kiss of Evil, or Polanski's spoof of it in The Fearless Vampire Killers), and a bevy -- no smaller number would do -- of naked babes. The regularity with which his sexual adventures succeed one another is unmistakably a hallmark of your run-of-the-mill pornographer. But Kubrick, over and above his stern reduction of the hero to frustrated voyeur instead of fully accredited participant, consistently slows things down and stretches things out, as if plausibility might be achieved, or at least ludicrousness avoided, through plain dullness. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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