DIRECTED BY: Julia Leigh
FEATURING: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie
PLOT: A quiet but reprobate student blindly contracts for unconventional assignments with an enigmatic madam to cater to the peculiar perversions of the ultra-rich.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Sleeping Beauty is not a sex-movie, but rather a tense, eerie multiple character study. The focused, unadorned manner in which it is shot, without a musical score, combines with the bizarre nature of its story to set an unusual mood which demands that we take it seriously. This atmosphere, and the choices the writer and director made in deciding what elements of its story to show us, to make Sleeping Beauty a weird and unusual viewing experience.
(Ignore the website and DVD jacket descriptions of this slick Aussie thriller; because US distributors don’t know how to present unusual efforts to a general audience, the synopses grossly mischaracterize this effort as some sort of racy potboiler. Sleeping Beauty is not a sex piece, even though Emily Browning looks just like a Real Doll sex doll in the trailer. Sleeping Beauty is not another Eyes Wide Shut. It is not designed to be racy or titillating. Nor is it a murky, confusing David Lynch-style movie, although fans of Lynch’s works will surely love it. Sleeping Beauty is in no way what I expected. It is unpredictable and although it declines to utilize a demented twist ending, I assure the reader he will never guess where it is heading).
For additional fun, be sure to look for an appearance by actor Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the crazed “Toecutter” in 1979’s Mad Max.
COMMENTS: Wow! What a gem! I was hoping for something different and creepy from the trailer. I was not disappointed! Yet I was surprised. I was expecting something sci-fi or horror, about turning girls into living sex dolls. Sleeping Beauty turns out to be so much more unsettling, sophisticated and subtle. From its opening frames, the somber cinematography and unabashed, close-in concentration on its characters makes it clear that you are watching a serious, high-quality effort crafted by a writer and director who know exactly what to do. There’s a controlling sensation that your impressions are being skillfully manipulated by the filmmakers. They are.
Pert Lucy (Browning) studies and works hard. She diligently struggles to hold down two jobs and make ends meet. Despite her disciplined efforts to get ahead, Lucy is secretly morally bankrupt. She leads a double life. She is a quiet, proletariat schoolgirl with a middle-class bearing. Yet with little fanfare, she is capable of almost invisibly slipping into deplorable, high risk behavior.
When a low-key professional outfit sends a “talent scout” to size up her character, they recruit Lucy into an ethereal shadow-land of opulent decadence. Lucy is not fully informed as to the context of her odd obligations, however, and as she executes them, she is drawn toward an uncertain destiny in a perverse world.
We watch nervously, and finally succumb to a mild, muted horror as we behold what she does and what happens to her. With her madam (Blake) overseeing Lucy’s refinement in the social arts as well as painful beauty makeovers, Lucy undergoes a transformation, becoming an object of desire. Now she is a girl of elegance and aesthetics: a living doll.
Sleeping Beauty is an art film, but there is no gimmicky, independent film-style “artiness” in the production. It is an unconventional movie, but it lets its creepy, unusual story and unsettling characters, rather than its shooting style, provide the bizarreness.
Filmed like a serious drama, Sleeping Beauty is anything but. This film is carefully structured, put together in an orthodox manner, yet it is excruciatingly agitating to watch. Delicately macabre characters flicker in and out of quiet scenes which blur the boundaries between suspense, thriller, horror, and mystery.
In the end however, Sleeping Beauty is an exquisitely presented character study of refined unscrupulousness. One of the keys to its effectiveness is its subtlety. Exposition is sublimely furnished, in real time, via strategically revealing scenes of the most vicarious nature. Like coyly spying voyeurs, peering from behind sunglasses or from the corners of our eyes a restaurant booth or a few coach seats away, we behold the participants gently unveiling their most damning personality quirks.
Sleeping Beauty is a study of unexpected contrasts, of anachronisms and contradictions which lurk on the boundary of the dark side of life. They are the types of anomalies we tend gloss over, the verboten sort. Polite decorum dictates that it is not merely unpleasant, but too morbid and ghastly to acknowledge them.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Wow. Such a glowing review of such a disappointing, vacuous film.
“although it declines to utilize a demented twist ending”
Oh, but it certainly does… The long, lingering look thru her secret camera, just before the final credits… did you not wonder why the director added that… especially since there was no action in that scene and was what we would have expected… if that is, you believe those screams of hers were of horror toward her situation… and not, as i suggest, screams of horror that she was still alive.
You don’t give this film maker enough credit. The girl woke up (no spoiler here, just my idea), found the man in his “condition” and seeing the familiar tea service, decided to kill herself. The film maker was careful to signal to you, the audience, that more than 4 doses of that sleep tea could kill, ‘earlier in the movie’, so the girl, in her groggy state, double dosed herself, maybe triple dosed, then laid down to die. The final shot shows the tea service in the background, as a hint to what actually happened. The girl, revived by the matron, woke up alive, and it was this at which she was screaming, her not being dead.
@Cassie,
Nice character study into the life of a troubled girl: lost her job, her place to live, her best friend dies of cancer/Aids (sorry, not a spolier: you can see this coming from the beginning of the movie), abusive mother who borrows money so many times from her daughter that the girl has to remember her own credit card number… Presented with what she thought was a horrid situation and possibly her fault in the “condition of the old man”, she decided to kill herself. With her final scream, we are finally presented with her self-realization of the horror her life had become and you think this was vacuous? I’d give it more credit than that, and I’d surely give this critic a thumbs up for coming down on the right side of a truly unique and disturbing film… the proof of which is in the critic’s reviews… 50/50, a sure sign that half the folks got it and half didn’t which is what happens with a movie that requires thinking… otherwise, they get either panned or paraded. Give this another look and this critic another chance.