1. The confession in Eyes Wide Shut
All of Stanley Kubrick's work is based on dichotomies, on the confrontation between two poles. The exercise of authority in opposition to free will, the transformation of man against the impossibility of winning over his essence, and the repression fighting against the indomitable brilliance. In the case of Eyes Wide Shut - the director's posthumous film based on the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler's novel, Traumnovelle - the fight is between desire and realization. Alice Harford (Kidman) and her husband Bill (Tom Cruise) see their marriage upended by a tirade she brings to the table when, on a night out, she confesses to her husband that she once thought of cheating on him with a man with the one who only crossed glances. It is that revealing monologue that pushes Bill on an odyssey that leads him to rethink the concepts of love and lust, amid orgies and unresolved mysteries.
In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick places the accent on attractive questions. Is fantasy worse than deception itself? Does the platonic imply infidelity like carnal contact? The answers, of course, never come. The answers, of course, are thrown at the spectator so that he can elucidate them according to his own parameters and experiences. Kidman, in those minutes that are almost dreamlike, is dazzling, and she defies not only Cruise but everyone who sets her eyes on her.
2. The uncontrollable crying in Reincarnation
If there is a film that could be considered the heir to the best of Kubrick - especially the aforementioned Eyes Wide Shut -, that is Reincarnation. Jonathan Glazer's feature film shares the same playful procedure with coldness, building a sophisticated atmosphere in which one seems to distance oneself from the characters when in reality the process is the opposite: both films are deeply emotional. As for Reincarnation, Glazer once again attacks the idea of karma, as he had already done in his music videos (two clear examples of this are UNKLE's "Rabbit in Your Headlights" and Radiohead's "Karma Police") and his debut feature, the brutal Wild Beast. In her second film, Kidman plays Anna, a woman who suddenly loses her husband and ten years later, when planning to marry her new partner, receives an unexpected visitor: a boy who claims to be the reincarnation of her first husband.
Glazer knows that the premise of the film could have led him to the absurd, but he manages to avoid it by recording all the stages of his protagonist's pain. In fact, his film works less like a thriller à la Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem and more like an effective allegory of mourning. In the scene we focus on in this story, the director takes an unforgettable close-up of Kidman at the opera, where her face transforms as she is subdued by the intensity of Wagner's composition and the anguish that comes from it. to discover that faith is an endless, fluctuating concept that can be embraced or questioned depending on the circumstances.
3. The therapy session at Big Little Lies
When Big Little Lies, the series produced by David E. Kelley, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, and based on the novel by Liane Moriarty, premiered, there was no doubt that the Emmy for best actress in a miniseries was going to fall into the hands of Kidman. Although the HBO drama evenly distributes the times and narrative spaces for its protagonists, in the last four episodes Nicole takes the lead and her plot is the one that becomes most relevant. The actress puts herself in the shoes of Celeste Wright, a lawyer who leaves her profession to take care of her children at the request of her husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), and who continually projects an image of the ideal wife (with a ditto family). The point of Big Little Lies is how she positions herself very far from Desperate Housewives—in the opposite direction, rather—and anchors her story in the power of the sisterhood of women.
On the other hand, the moments that focus on the domestic violence that Perry exerts on Celeste are almost always shown through brief flashbacks, as if reinforcing the idea that the woman tries to suppress and deny them. However, if there was one extraordinary scene in the miniseries, it was Celeste's first solo therapy session with her psychologist Amanda de Ella (Robin Weigert, excellent). Celeste recounts to her regret the violent episodes she suffered, avoiding her eye contact with her therapist and trying to hold back her tears. With those outstanding ten minutes and that final look at her friends Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) and Jane (Shailene Woodley) in one moment of monstrous revelation, the actress rightfully clinched the television accolade.
4. The mourning of love songs in Moulin Rouge!
The third and final installment of the "red curtain" trilogy with which Baz Luhrmann paid tribute to both dance (Strictly Ballroom) and language (Romeo + Juliet) and the confluence of different arts and disciplines (Moulin Rouge!) does not only highlights how the Australian director imbibed the work of his parents (mother a dancer and ballroom teacher, a father who owns a cinema) but also the absolute passion with which he takes care of the details of the settings. At Moulin Rouge! there is not a single moment to take a breath and enjoy a scene. On the contrary, the filmmaker gets out of control in the best sense of the term (his adaptation of The Great Gatsby ran a different fate) and aims to conceive a work that awakens the senses.
Likewise, the filmmaker recognizes himself as corny and doesn't care: he goes straight ahead. Therefore, it is no coincidence that in the scene in which the courtesan Satine (Kidman) and the poet Christian (Ewan McGregor) fall in love, the epiphanic moment arrives with music as a fundamental component. The elephant is part of the mythology of Moulin Rouge!, but also as a symbol of strength in the face of adversity, the furious red that challenges us, the camera that moves frantically and makes us dizzy, and that medley of love songs (from "All You Need Is Love" to "Heroes") create a real show. As the director once said when talking about how he had wanted to adapt Romeo + Juliet, the answer is only one: "I am an entertainer, I think about providing a show and nothing else."
5. The painful memory in The labyrinth
After embodying his creation Hedwig and the Angry Inch and surprising with the controversial Shortbus, John Cameron Mitchell turned to make a much more refined and distressing film, but once again exploring the ins and outs of identity. In this case, the film based on the novel by David Lindsay-Abaire (and adapted by himself) shows how the loss of a child in an accident affects marriage and the search for the mother Becca (Kidman) of the young man responsible for the done (Jason, played by Miles Teller, in one of his first breakout roles). Mitchell knows that the field of family mourning has been dealt with repeatedly (as in Robert Redford's People Like One) and that is why the duo with Lindsay-Abaire is more than successful since the writer knows what commonplaces to avoid. Years later, Kidman would star in The Family Fang, Jason Bateman's film also focused on family ties and had the same screenwriter.
The climax of The Labyrinth comes when Becca and Jason come face to face and this woman begins to experience an unexpected affection for the young man she took from her four-year-old son. Thus, Mitchell's film does not unequivocally treat pain, but instead delves into the gray areas, into the most uncomfortable part of that process in which both parents experience sadness but are unable to accompany themselves due to their limitations.
