SOURCE: Cliff, Nigel. “The Liberation of Dreams.” Times of London (19 July 1999): 18.

In the following essay, Cliff compares the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut with Schnitzler's Dream Story, on which the film was based.

Arthur Schnitzler was certainly a greater libertine than Stanley Kubrick, but Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's loose adaptation of Schnitzler's 1926 short novel Traumnovella (Dream Story), is the more sexually explicit of the two works. That, though, says more about Kubrick than Schnitzler, who delighted in stamping on the standards of bourgeois morality.

Born in 1862, Schnitzler was best known for his play Reigen, a bawdy sexual merry-go-round filmed as La Ronde and rewritten by David Hare as The Blue Room—which, famously, also starred Nicole Kidman. Like Reigen, Dream Story is set in fin-de-siècle Vienna, its brilliant social whirl masking a degenerate heart.

But the expressionist Dream Story is not concerned—at least not directly—with society...