The suffering and the odyssey of a modern married couple upset by the pangs of jealousy and adultery. Only conjugal love can save them. Perhaps among Kubrick’s production this movie has the most optimistic view and is one of the few with a happy ending. Modern society is obsessed by the idea of sex as “goods” (the scene of the orgy and Cruise’s peregrinations are intentionally bad and obscene), to which the couple’s intimate and happy love is opposed. And it is this love that can save them from temptation. The first twenty – or thirty – minutes are astonishing, the movie is stylistically perfect and the actors are very good. But anyway the short story was actually more ambiguous, intriguing and interesting. Yet this is the last beautiful movie of the greatest director of all times, who has defined this work as “a story which explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage”. It is probably curious that two years later the Cruises have divorced after eleven years of happy marriage (and having adopted two children): maybe it be that Kubrick has had a hand in this? Incredible but true: in the movie Kubrick appears in a cameo, sitting on a table of the Sonata Cafè. His daughter Vivian Kubrick is the mother of the child whom Cruise examines, while the red-dressed man who presides over the orgy is the director’s assistant, Leon Vitali and the old newsagent at whom Cruise stops to observe a newspaper when he thinks to be shadowed is Emilio D’Alessandro, Kubrick’s personal driver. In the Italian version, on the advice of Italian dubbing director, Mario Maldesi, Cruise is dubbed for the first time by Massimo Populizio, with a more intense and fragile voice, which better fits to the character, replacing the usual dubber, Roberto Chevalier, who has a younger and more masculine voice. Eva Herzigova seems to have probably refuted Kubrick’s proposal in order to accept the offer by Vincenzo Salemme to act in his movie “L’amico del cuore”. For further information about the movie and its actors (who have granted numerous interviews) you may find and see the short (awful) documentary film (about 25’) by Paul Joyce, entitled “The last movie”, broadcasted by Channel Four. It is interesting to notice that the highly erotic movie production by Kubrick ends with the hopeful and newly word “fuck”. (www.centraldocinema.it)