Hyped ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ has strokes of genius

EYES WIDE SHUT, directed by Stanley Kubrick, written by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Running time: 159 minutes. Rated R.

It isn’t often that one imagines polite society taking part in a masked orgy, but in this, Stanley Kubrick’s 13th and final feature film, that’s precisely the case.

Still, contrary to the hype and controversy swirling about that scene, and Nicole Kidman’s nude scenes, and the fact that she and her husband, Tom Cruise, are intimate together on screen, director Kubrick, who orchestrated all of this from a 1926 Viennese novella by Arthur Schnitzler, may have orchestrated it decades too late — indeed, there is nothing here that will shock today’s jaded audiences, some of which saw much more skin and sexual gymnastics in 1980’s “Caligula.” Or on any season of “Melrose Place.”

On one level, Kubrick’s inability to shock robs his film of its intended emotional impact; the man who was once a leader in cinema now seems in his 12-year hiatus from film as if he’s less in touch with what shakes the world. But “Eyes” nevertheless has its strokes of genius. It is a film that works on many levels — the illusory, the real, the fantasy, the ethereal and everything that falls in between.

It is Kubrick’s close examination of everything that falls in between, and how that relates to human relationships, that makes his painfully languorous film absolutely worth seeing. Grade: B+

BESIEGED, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, written by Bertolucci and Clare Peploe. Running time: 92 minutes. Rated R. Nightly, July 19-29, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Besieged,” it’s not so much what is said, but what is unsaid; not so much what is heard, but what we see; and not so much what is revealed, as what isn’t revealed that makes the film a maddeningly evasive experience that, in the end, proves rewarding.

The film explores the relationship between a wealthy expatriate English pianist (David Thewlis) and his black housekeeper (Thandie Newton), a woman who fled her native Africa during political turmoil.

Lofted throughout by Alessio Vlad’s score, Bertolucci’s film mirrors Kubrick’s in that it’s something of a tonic for the summer of 1999 — it demands that its audience do some work, particularly in understanding who this odd couple is, and how they become a couple at all. Grade: B

Christopher Smith’s “The Week in Rewind” appears each Thursday in The Scene. Each Tuesday on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” he appears in Cinema Center.