This scene helps unlock the movie’s many mysteries. Cruise and Kidman never particularly had much chemistry, but here, Kubrick seems to play off that idea: She’s more interested in seeing herself than she is in him, and the look of urgency on his face is more that of a man in desperation than it is one of arousal or love. That then set up many critics and audiences for inevitable disappointment, when they discovered that the film was, indeed, a curiously old-fashioned thriller that was uninterested in titillation or breaking taboos. But it’s also important because this scene also served as the film’s trailer, and by foregrounding the sex to such a degree, it may have (along with unfounded and inaccurate rumors from the set) helped raise expectations that Kubrick’s final work would be some kind of mythically explicit fuck-fest. First, it’s beautiful, and it elegantly captures the film’s through-the-looking-glass atmosphere. But it could be argued that the early, looking-in-the-mirror sex scene between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman was more significant. True, much of the controversy over Stanley Kubrick’s final film centered on the infamous orgy sequence (and the digital images inserted at key moments to mask potentially NC-17-inspiring nudity).
