Dream Story aka Traumnovelle - Lilith Likes to Watch
Title: Dream Story aka Traumnovelle
Year: 2024
Starring: Nikolai Kinski, Nora Islei
Director: Florian Frerichs
Synopsis: After his wife confesses to having sexual fantasies about another man, a revered doctor becomes intrigued by a secret sex ‘ball’ attended by some of the city’s most prominent. Disguising himself in a cloak and mask, he sneaks in, despite warnings that attending could destroy his life. - via Letterboxd.com
Lilith's Notes: It takes guts to touch Kubrick's final work, I'll give it that.
"Because if it's nothing more than desire, it's not real."
Imagine being a film maker. Imagine being confident and daring enough to decide you want to remake a classic film that, while not everyone has seen, everyone has most definitely heard of. The film is notorious, and brought to screen over 25 years ago by one of the most well known and visionary directors who have ever lived. And what if it was his final piece of work offered to this world before he passes on? What if you take that story, known for being provocative, impenetrable, visually sumptuous and make it look…
Cheap?
Kage and I were searching for something to watch last week and he was throwing trailers at me. He passed this one on and by the time I saw the two masked figures exchange very familiar dialogue I said, “Wait. This is just Eyes Wide Shut.”
Kage said “Seriously”
Then I said, “No, it’s actually based on the 1920s novel Traumnovelle. We have to watch it. We have no choice.”
A quick rundown of the plot of Dream Story for those who don’t know: After his wife confesses to fantasizing about a stranger, Dr. Jakob Maincharacter wanders through the streets in search of… something. Sex maybe? Anyway he ends up at a sex club that’s supposed to be super spooky and dangerous but then he leaves, someone dies, then he goes home to get monologued at by his wife. The end!
In my original review of Eyes Wide Shut, I decided that it was a horribly obtuse work of art that, while beautiful, ultimately doesn’t work for me. However, compared to Dream Story, It’s even more of a feast for the eyes, not to mention that characters have something similar to personalities, charisma and chemistry.
While Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut tells the story of a man struggling with a growing distance between himself and his wife, he’s also grappling with the desire to be among the greats of society, the upper crust, the untouchables. He’s the 1 percent, but he wants to be even higher, even more important.
Dream Story delights in just showing off Berlin. The movie comes across as a surface-level travel commercial. Come to Berlin, it says, We like to get weird with it.
And while Cruise’s character Bill was striving to attain what remained just out of his reach, Jakob (Played by Nikolai Kinski) just comes across as “Berlin is weird and I am bored.”
But, how weird, really? Because I know what you’re all waiting for.
The masquerade scene is just all wrong. The masks have no iconic look, or a shred of personality. They’re matte plastic garbage you could get at any dollar store, and half the people present aren’t even wearing them. There’s nothing ominous or threatening about this secret society above lip-service. The entire monochromatic experience is blink and you’ll miss it.
I understand, because there’s no way anyone is going to be able to compare to the original, so don’t even try. Kubrick went well-lit and Venetian, with rooms and rooms of debauchery? Go the inverse: Black and white, cheap as dirt, one room with poor lighting and 3 colours. Sure.
Oh, but this movie does try for it’s own contemporary visual flair that will age it terribly. There is an AI dream sequence in this movie that is already dated to the degree that everything is offputting and hideous. While the wife, Amelia (played by Laurine Price), narrates a pointless dream she had, the viewer is treated to the hallucinations vomited out by a computer. Maybe, if one is feeling charitable, one could at least give them credit to going to the trouble of training the machines on the likeness of the actors, and using AI for a dream sequence makes some perverse sense, but hire a fucking matte painting artist, get a smoke machine, and a shutterstock account! The amount of time and effort it took for them to make that sequence was likely not a worthy trade off for doing it practically. At least practically, it would have been a human’s own work and not theft warmed over.
Also splattered throughout the film are dreamlike operatic sequences starring Jakob in the lead role, where in blood is repeatedly coughed upon him. At the end of the film, the various characters we met during the narrative applaud the opera and it feels vexingly self-congradulatory.
The coup de gras, however, is when Jakob begins wandering the streets and for no reason at all, decides to break the fourth wall and address the audience. What even the fuck? Do people not know how to adapt books to film? There are much better ways to communicate ideas.
I suppose it’s admirable that someone decided to take another crack at a Kubrick film, but Florian Frerichs isn’t Adrien Lyne, this isn’t Lolita and unlike the original novel, I doubt anyone will remember this adaptation one hundred years from now.
Highlight: Costuming had some highlights early on, especially the masks Domino and Domina were wearing in the beginning, and shout out to a glittery cocktail dress worn by a lounge singer.
Lowlight: They should have expanded on the operatic sequences rather than suddenly fling us all into the realm of AI.
LILITH'S SCORE: 2/5
Until next time, my voracious voyeurs. I’m Lilith, and I’m always watching.
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