Director
Stanley Kubrick
Leading Actors/Actresses
Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman
Supporting Actors/Actresses
Sydney Pollack, Marie Richardson, Todd Field, Julienne Davis
Genre
Drama
Language
English
Awards
Nominated for the Golden Globes for Best Original Score, awarded the Best Foreign Film Award at the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics, Bastone Bianco Award at the Venice film Festival
Date of Release
July 16 1999 in the United States of America
Producer
Stanley Kubrick
Setting and Context
The action in the film takes place in New York, around Christmas during the period of approximately two days.
Narrator and Point of View
The film is filmed from an objective third person point of view.
Tone and Mood
Sexually-charged, tense
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is Bill and the antagonist is the man in the red cloak at the sexual party that is held in the mansion.
Major Conflict
The major conflict is an internal one and is the result of Bill’s desire to give in to his sexual desires and his desire to remain faithful to his wife.
Climax
The film reaches its climax when Bill sees the dead body of the prostitute who was probably the person who saved him during the party at the mansion.
Foreshadowing
The interactions Bill has with the two women in the beginning and the interaction between Alice and Sandor foreshadows the future sexual references that will appear in the film.
Understatement
When Sandor claims that women used to get married simply because they wanted to lose their virginity is an understatement as he later reveals that the real reason is that they wanted to be free to sleep with as many men as they wanted without fearing that they will be criticized by the society in which they lived.
Innovations in Filming or Lighting or Camera Techniques
To force the viewer to immerse into the movie and become one with the movie, wide angled lenses are used also POV shots that forces the viewer to engage.
Allusions
It is alluded that Mandy was the person who saved Bill during the sexual party where Bill was discovered as being an intruder. Bill is told that he has to pay for what he had done and is told to strip naked. At that point, the masked woman appears and offers herself to redeem Bill. After that, the woman is taken by a man wearing a mask with an extremely long beak. The mask the man wore is extremely similar to the masks worn by the people who were given the job of removing the dead bodies from the plague ridden homes during Victorian England. Thus, through this image, it is alluded that that Mandy was going to killed, something that comes to pass later in the movie.
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
N/A
