Adaptation of the original material of 'Eyes Wide Shut'

It takes, to use a precise technical term, cheekinessfor a director to adapt the same source material as Stanley Kubrick. Yet that is exactly what director Florian Frerichs (The Last Supper) did with Traumnovelhis film based on the classic 1926 short story by Arthur Schnitzler which also inspired Kubrick's last film, the 1999 one Eyes tightly closed. Frerichs offers a cinematic version of the story that is more faithful than Kubrick's, and also more erotic. (Kubrick, for all his brilliance, tended toward coldness in his work, even when dealing with spicy subjects.) Still, it's hard to avoid making comparisons, which inevitably color your opinion of this film that received its world premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival.

The story has been updated to modern-day Berlin, which allows for eye-opening touches like the one in the first scene, when two beautiful women approach a man in a nightclub demonstrating the healthful effects of a vibrator app. The man is Jacob (Nikolai Kinski, son of Klaus, who doesn't quite project the same menacing air as his father), a doctor, who has come to the club with his wife Amelia (Laurine Price, Phoenix). Although both he and Amelia attract attention from the opposite sex when they are out, they return home together.

But the experience leads them to talk about sexual desires and fantasies, with Amelia confessing to a long-distance crush on a handsome Danish naval officer while they were recently on vacation. This prompts an outraged and hurt Jacob to go out into the night, where he experiences a series of bizarre and sexually tinged encounters, the most notable of which are visits to a brothel after meeting a beautiful girl (Nora Islei) on the street and a private sex party where all attendees are required to wear masks.

There are numerous fantasy sequences along the way, including Jacob performing an opera on stage and the other singers coughing blood on him; and Jacob single-handedly subduing a gang of attackers, at least until one of them stabs him in the stomach. All of this plays out, as Schnitzer intended, as an extended dream sequence with many sexualized elements, including the nurse in Jacob's office.

The director, working from a script co-written with Martina van Delay, makes major stylistic changes, such as when Jacob suddenly breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewers directly quite late in the film. He also uses colorful animation, some of it rotoscoped, during a dream sequence that is visually striking but feels out of place with what preceded it. It also feels odd that the dialogue is in English, with only occasional snippets of German thrown in, like an old World War II movie.

Traumnovel It's certainly compelling, thanks to the murky, alluring nature of the source material, but it too often recalls the kind of soft-core erotica that once appeared regularly on late-night cable channels, such as Red Shoe Diaries(At the end of the film, one almost expects a thoughtful reflection from David Duchovny. Instead, we are quoted from Sigmund Freud.)

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