Adaptation of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Source Material

It takes, to use a precise technical term, chutzpah, for a filmmaker to adapt the same source material as Stanley Kubrick. Yet that’s exactly what director Florian Frerichs (The Last Supper) has done with Traumnovelle, his film based on Arthur Schnitzler’s classic 1926 novella that also inspired Kubrick’s final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut. Frerichs offers a cinematic take on the story that’s more faithful than Kubrick’s, and also more erotic. (Kubrick, for all his brilliance, tended toward chilliness in his work, even when dealing with racy themes). Nonetheless, it’s hard to avoid making comparisons, which inevitably color your opinion of this film receiving its world premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival.

The story has been updated to modern-day Berlin, which allows the opportunity for such eyes-wide-opening touches as the one in the first scene, when two beautiful women come on to a man in a nightclub by demonstrating the salutary effects of a vibrator app. The man is Jacob (Nikolai Kinski, Klaus’ son, who doesn’t project quite the same air of menace as his father), a doctor, who has come to the club with his wife Amelia (Laurine Price, Phoenix). Even though both he and Amelia attract the attentions of the opposite sex while they’re out, they dutifully go home together.

But the experience does lead them to talk about sexual desires and fantasies, with Amelia confessing to having become infatuated from afar with a handsome Danish naval officer while they were recently on vacation. This prompts an outraged and hurt Jacob to head out into the night, where he experiences a series of bizarre, sexually tinged encounters — the most notable of which are visits to a bordello after meeting a beautiful young woman (Nora Islei) on the street and a private sex party in which all the participants are required to wear masks.

Along the way there are numerous fantasy sequences, including Jacob performing onstage in an opera and having blood coughed on him by fellow singers; and Jacob single-handedly subduing a gang of assailants, at least until one of them stabs him in the stomach. It all comes across, as Schnitzer intended — like an extended dream sequence with many elements sexualized, including the nurse in Jacob’s office.

The director, working from a screenplay co-written with Martina van Delay, takes some big stylistic swings, such as having Jacob suddenly break the fourth wall and address viewers directly fairly late in the proceedings. He also employs colorful animation, some of it rotoscoped, during a dream sequence that’s visually striking but feels incongruous with what’s preceded it. It also feels strange that the dialogue is in English, with only occasional snippets of German thrown in, like an old World War II movie.

Traumnovelle is certainly absorbing, thanks to the fascinatingly lurid nature of its source material, but it too often feels redolent of the sort of soft-core erotica that used to pop up regularly on late-night cable, such as Red Shoe Diaries. (At the film’s conclusion, you half expect some thoughtful rumination by David Duchovny. Instead, we get a quote from Sigmund Freud.)

Kinski, who’s onscreen for virtually every minute, is a compellingly offbeat screen presence, more convincing in his journey down the sexual rabbit hole than Tom Cruise ever managed to be. His performance is one of the stronger elements in a film that never quite lives up to its considerable ambitions.