NYC through the Eyes of Stanley

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

I love to watch Eyes Wide Shut every December and let myself sink into its fictional world. 1990s New York City streets with neon signs, newspaper stands, diners, and strings of colorful Christmas lights. I love the cups of coffee and the cappuccino from the little café around the corner from the Sonata nightclub, the place where Bill learns that the password is “Fidelio” because Nick Nightingale carelessly scrawls it on the back of a napkin. There’s so much care given to every detail of this film. The texture of each shot, the warm, glowy lighting, the rich colors, the paintings, the music.

Taking in the sets that were built for this film, the New York City storefronts and street corners, there’s always a moment of confusion, “is this a real store?” before I remember that it’s a set that was built at Pinewood Studios in London, England. It’s hard to tell because Stanley had them reconstruct Greenwich Village with such attention to detail that he sent a designer to New York to measure the exact width of the streets and the distance between newspaper vending machines.

And yet, Stanley’s NYC is has the quality of a memory, in that you can tell it’s not exactly real. It’s real and imaginary at the same time. That’s the magic of cinema, baby!