Word: schnitzler
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...they're based, but in this case anyone able to track down the novel from which the movie has been rather faithfully adapted by Kubrick and co-writer Frederic Raphael would have been more in the know. Titled Traumnovelle (Dream Story), it was first published in 1926 by Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese playwright, physician and friend of Freud's, and has been available in paperback in the U.S. since 1995. Like a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged fiction of the second rank, in need of the vivifying physicalization...
Cruise's William accepts this dubious reassurance but is haunted by powerfully lubricious visions of his wife making love to the officer as he goes about his night-time rounds in modern New York City, which Kubrick has substituted for Schnitzler's fin-de-siecle Vienna. The possibilities of relief--or should we call it revenge?--are everywhere: a newly dead patient's daughter comes on to William powerfully yet pathetically; a cheerful prostitute invites him to a casual coupling; and, finally, in the movie's central sequence, he succeeds in invading a secret orgy, where masked couples disport themselves...
...pygmy-size works around them. New plays these days tend to be small, tidy things, dramas that tend their own little garden and don't venture very far into the wild outdoors. Hare's The Blue Room, which brought Nicole Kidman to Broadway earlier this season, reduced Schnitzler's La Ronde to a trivial actors' exercise for two. Hare then went one better (or one lesser) by appearing onstage alone, recounting his trip to the Middle East and calling it a play, Via Dolorosa. Another well-received import from Britain, The Weir, is a 90-minute chamber piece in which...
...morning after. The Blue Room is Hare's adaptation of La Ronde, Arthur Schnitzler's once scandalous play in which 10 characters engage in a daisy chain of sexual encounters. Hare updates the play in predictable ways--the soldier becomes a taxi driver; the "young miss" a miniskirted model--and has all the parts played by the two stars. The casting gimmick, along with the chicly impersonal production (a semiabstract set framed in neon), makes the vignettes seem more facile and obvious: Schnitzler's acid portrayal of sex as the great leveler on a climb up the social ladder...
...First Lady Suite. At its best, in the above scenes and in a desperate encounter between a Senator and a streetwalker, it attains emotional clarity and sustained surprise. The structure -- A meets B, B meets C, and so on until the last character encounters A -- comes from Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde. In that piece, set in fin-de-siecle Vienna, sex crosses social lines, allowing commentary, and serves as a metaphor for syphilis, permitting preachment. LaChiusa resists the obvious AIDS allusion. His love connections are timeless, and hopeless. Yet consistently thwarting his characters does not impede the ribald, puckish...