Sleeping Beauty

Synopsis: Lucy (Emily Browning) looks like your average university student, living in shared accommodation and working at a couple of jobs to support herself. But she also likes to flirt with danger, cruises upmarket bars for random sexual encounters and eventually gets involved in a boutique service that requires her to play a “Sleeping Beauty” to wealthy old men.

Sleeping Beauty opens by showing us its protagonist, Lucy, in a virtually empty research laboratory having a tube inserted into her stomach via her mouth by a white coated male, lead actress Emily Browning gagging as the process takes place. It is an enigmatic and slightly eerie introduction to what is to come. We are then shown a series of vignettes from the daily life of this attractive, existentially-alienated young woman whose only point of genuine emotional contact is Birdmann (Ewen Leslie), a friend who lives cooped up in a cheap one bedroom flat. All this is shown at a measured pace, to the accompaniment of little dialogue and in desaturated colour, all of which effectively establishes the film's disconnected emotional tone.

Debut writer-director Julia Leigh, a successful novelist, places her vagrant young woman in a hermetic world that has no external referents and whose characters (Chris Hayward’s repugnant sadist and Birdmann’s brother, both appearing in brief scenes, being the only notable exceptions) behave as if in the same condition of suspended animation. The effect is to detach the characters from any recognizable modus operandi. Which of course is just what we experience in our dreams, of which we are the sometime observers. Despite its appearance of being about a real world, it is not going too far to say that Sleeping Beauty is Ms Leigh’s dream and Lucy, her oneiric self.

Given that the film is essentially a representation of emotional imprisonment, whether this will appeal to audiences is questionable. Stylistically the film brings to mind, on the one hand European art-house films of the early 1970s like Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) with their deliciously contrived fondness for fin de siècle decadence and, on the other hand, the more recent intellectual provocations of a Catherine Breillat or a Michael Haneke (and inevitably, in terms of setting at least, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut,1999). Ms Leigh however gives us little in the way of sensationalism (how standards have changed) or provocation (ditto) for in her unvaryingly close directorial control she tends to leaves us as indifferent to her pale protagonist as she (Lucy) is, or pretends to be, to herself. Perhaps this is what Ms Leigh intended, although if so it will leave her open to the charge of having indulged her very personal fantasy. If she did not, then she probably should have left a connecting door open to the real world.

There are some fine things about the film, which is technically very impressive, especially as a first-time effort. Rachel Blake perfectly judges her role as the upmarket madam whilst Emily Browning, already a veteran of the big and small screens despite her youth, is the jewel in the crown. Flawlessly cool yet with a suggestion of yearning and with the body of an Ingres odalisque, she meets the heavy demands placed on her by her director with exemplary commitment, in the aforementioned probe scenes and particularly in the latter stages of the film when she becomes the titular character who, completely supine, is maltreated by lecherous old men (let’s assume I’m referring to the characters rather than the actors playing them). This part of the film is visually elegant with marvellous art direction and is beautifully photographed by DOP, Geoffrey Simpson. However, whilst cultural theorists will no doubt find grist for their mill in interpreting Ms Leigh's agenda, I suspect that for many, like a dream, Sleeping Beauty will remain an impenetrable enigma.

 

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