Film - Jonathan Romney on what sets Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut apart

You'll have read by now that Stanley Kubrick's final film Eyes Wide Shut is a terrible let-down - neither a definitive farewell statement nor the out-and-out art-bonkbuster promised by so many seasons of media gossip. Much of the talk, even from those who haven't yet seen the film, is almost resentful: how dare Kubrick not deliver what everyone assumed he had promised? The mood is akin to erotic disappointment, which is quite fitting, for that is essentially the film's subject. If Eyes Wide Shut leaves us frustrated, perplexed and a little chastened, then that's exactly how the hero feels by the end of it. Kubrick's swansong, unlike so many apparent "instant masterpieces", is no open-and-shut case.

Both mainstream and art cinema have struggled for years to find ways of dealing directly with sex, and reputed directors often confess an ambition to use the language of pornography to serious effect. The few who try do so at their cost: either they're branded as straightforward sleaze-mongers (as Bertolucci and Oshima have been) or they embarrass and alienate mainstream audiences who would love to see the occasional high-class skin-flick but recoil when the thornier dilemmas of desire are aired. Eyes Wide Shut addresses some traditional questions about what really goes between men and women in their beds and their heads, which makes it more unsettling than it would have been if Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had simply regaled us with a Jeff Koons and Cicciolina act for two hours.

Kubrick is in good company here. Catherine Breillat's soon-to-be-released Romance, which uses hard-porn conventions to ask what women really want, is lucid and awkward in equal measure, but it's a European art film and therefore perceived as having a licence to address the mind as well as the loins. No such permission was extended, however, to Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, a black farce about the pitfalls of amour fou. I've rarely heard such derisive laughter from an audience, yet Polanski's film is largely about the excruciating incommunicability of other people's urges, and is seriously ripe for reappraisal.

Eyes Wide Shut is close to Bitter Moon, both in its sense of sexual masquerade and in its unreal atmosphere. It was adapted, by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael, from Arthur Schnitzler's brief Dream Story and is surprisingly faithful to it both in story and mood. Part of the film's fascination is the way that its ostensible New York setting melts into a fin de siecle Vienna of the imagination (Schnitzler's tale, though published in 1926, also seems to take place in an unspecified past). The story is a nocturnal odyssey of sexual non-event: made jealous by the confession of a secret desire by his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) passes a night of perverse visions and failed encounters, culminating in a traumatic visit to a masked party.

Bewilderingly for viewers of 1990s mainstream cinema, in which sexual content is tossed in as randomly and routinely as product placement, Harford either refuses sex or finds it refused him. Viewers may wonder why sex or its absence is such a big deal, but that's precisely what the film wants to make us think about. The erotic appears in guises both disturbing and hackneyed, even kitsch. The private party is ludicrous, a quasi-masonic ritual that smacks equally of de Sade, Max Ernst and the Venice carnival at its tackiest. It's clearly a hollow charade - unless you choose to take it seriously, as the film dares us to.

At stake in this ambivalence is the individual's paranoia that sex is everywhere, hidden under the surface of the familiar world, and that everyone is conspiring to keep it inaccessible to him alone. Bill's ostensible fear is of exclusion from female desire, but it is also coloured by the heterosexual man's anxiety about exclusion from other shades of male sexuality. In one scene, Bill has a run-in with students who call him a "faggot". In fact, the thrust of this moment in Schnitzler's story is that the students are anti-Semitic, which suggests that his hero Fridolin is excluded in another sense. The fact that Kubrick instructed Raphael to suppress any Jewish references in the script makes the theme all the more suggestive as a hidden subtext; one American critic has called this Kubrick's most Jewish film.

Eyes Wide Shut is uneven in many ways - there are some awkward character turns, and the last 20 minutes feel anti-climactic. But maybe we should suspend the reductive question, "Is it any good or not?" and acknowledge that it's a fascinating, tantalising film that will continue to be argued about. It's also a remarkable anomaly in look and feel: photographed with a strange Christmassy luminescence and on unusually grainy stock, it feels like a film from another time.

I'm tempted to see it as a follow-up to Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining: the opening party sequence could be another night at the Overlook Hotel. Like The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut is about the pressures within a marriage. It's also about the terror of what other people do for fun - and the fear of not being invited.

"Eyes Wide Shut" (18) is on nationwide release

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