Eyes Wide Shut by Leinwand Paule

This is Kubrick's final and, apparently, most personal movie. The great man died just before they got it in the can. It deals with relationships -- sex and love, to use plain-speak. The relationship we vicariously enter is the marriage between a young doctor and his beautiful wife. Yes, they seem to have it all: social status, success, each other; yet still they lust for more.

One night at a party, while the missus is in the powder room, the husband is propositioned by a pair of lovely ladies but is suddenly called upstairs to perform the nude-hooker-revival routine. In the meantime, a stranger asks his wife to dance -- leading to intimacy. Yes, it's one of those parties where everybody wants to do it with everybody else's wife -- although neither partner in our doctor-wife relationship ever actually seems to get to it.

On another fateful night the doc makes a house-call, only to be accosted by the daughter of the patient, albeit freshly deceased -- always a crowd-pleaser. Pooping her party he roams the night streets and is following a tasty hooker to her nest . . . only to have fate intervene again, in the form of a summons on the millstone-around-neck mobile and so must abandon the project. (Cell-phones taking precedence over glandular business, needless to say.)

It is well after midnight when the weary doctor finally stumbles onto a hard-core gathering featuring a small army of masked men and women running through your standard orgy moves. At last we learn what love and life are all about.

This movie is designed as an aphrodisiac in celluloid. Stoke up the Viagra, watch it with your spouse, and your relationship may never be the same! Or simply see it as a slick Hollywood product and nod inscrutably.

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