1999
Doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), well-to-do New Yorkers, make a handsome couple. One evening, Alice, seeking to arouse her husband's jealousy, confesses that she fantasised a whole night over a naval officer with whom she had exchanged only a simple look. Bill, who has always had entire confidence in his wife up until then, becomes obsessed by this revelation, which seems to open the doors to his own fantasies. In the course of a nocturnal wandering, he finds himself at a mysterious masked party where the participants indulge in sexual rites. The sect unmasks him and threatens him. In the morning, he avows his recent experiences to his wife and, in the middle of a Christmas toy shop, they promise to stay together and love each other.
Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick's last film, is the adaptation of a story by Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle, 1926. The main change carried out by the director and his co-writer, Frederic Raphael, consisted of transposing the story from late-19th-century Vienna to present-day New York.
The film was shot entirely in London (except for the establishing shots, filmed in New York) and lasted 52 weeks...
The director, who insisted that the roles of Bill and Alice be played by a real couple, chose Cruise and Kidman, who were married at the time.
Kubrick considered Eyes Wide Shut the best film of his career. He died a few months before this final work was released (16 July 1999 in the United States and the following 15 September in France). As often with a Kubrick film, reviews were mixed; in France, the specialised press was, on the whole, enthusiastic.