Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty

If you thought student tuition fees in the UK were bad, spare a thought for the poor drongoes attending college in Oz, particularly Lucy (Sucker Punch’s Emily Browning), the protagonist of Julia Leigh’s hypnotic, clinical, chilly study of eroticism and alienation, Sleeping Beauty. 

When we first meet her she’s showing remarkable control of her gag reflex as a paid guinea pig in a medical test.  Then she’s mopping tables in a diner.  Finally, she’s hanging out in a hotel bar as an elegant escort.  Next morning, she gets home, totally sh*gged out, only for one of her flat-mates to demand her share of the rent.  Which she still can’t cover!  Is it any wonder then that when high-class madam-cum-guru Clara (Rachael Blake) offers her a job as a highly-paid, silver service waitress at the weird fetish parties she organises, Lucy jumps at the chance.  All she has to do is serve wine in skimpy lingerie to a society of wealthy, elderly men (and one woman) who gather on a regular basis to indulge in some very formal, very proper, sensual gluttony, gorging themselves on rare dishes and pawing scantily-clad courtesans who look like they just stepped out of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video. 

It’s not long before Clara’s offering Lucy more lucrative employment as a “sleeping beauty” where she’ll be drugged and the aging pervs get to spend the night doing, well, whatever takes their fancy (short of penetration) to her slumbering naked body.  The service Clara offers is completely confidential, a chance for her clients to live out their dark fantasies, free of shame, and not even Lucy will know what goes on while she sleeps.  But Lucy is curious and, as her waking life fragments, she clandestinely films her next engagement…    

There’s a moment in Sleeping Beauty when madam Clara, in the midst of briefing new girl Lucy about her role, solemnly informs her: “Your vagina will not be penetrated.  Your vagina is a temple.”  To which the forthright young miss immediately snorts: “My vagina is not a temple.”  In this one scene, Leigh and Browning neatly encapsulate Lucy, her outward seeming passivity at odds with the nihilistic strength that drives her journey. 

An Australian-cultivated cutting of the English Rose, Browning is a pale-skinned, russet-haired, idealised image of innocence and feminine beauty, and gives the kind of performance critics normally call ‘fearless.’ 

‘Fearless’ of course meaning naked. 

In fact, Browning is totally ‘fearless’ for much of the film.  But her performance is also fearless in the brave sense as well, naked in the sense of her rawness.  Outwardly passive, her character is merely adrift, lonely, alienated, and Browning delivers a performance of subtlety, depth and insolent intelligence.  Possessed of a fragile beauty but with an inner resilience, she says little and does less but even when drugged and unconscious, her body a blank slate for ancient, withered, sensual adventurers to write their fantasies on, you never feel she’s not in control of her own destiny.  Browning’s Lucy has chosen to drift off to sleep in this fairy tale and when the time comes, she’ll wake up and leave it behind.  She just won’t be woken by a handsome prince.

Cold and mesmerising, Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty plays out like the flipside of Yasunari Kawabati’s The House Of The Sleeping Beauties (already filmed in 2006 as Das Haus der schlafenden Schönen) in which an aging lothario becomes obsessed with the secrets of the titular high-class brothel.  Leigh merely swaps the elderly male for the passive young female.  The film’s not without flaws, it walks the high-wire of pretension like Dumbo with an umbrella clutched in his trunk but it never actually falls.  For an erotic film featuring one of the world’s most beautiful young actresses frequently undraped, it’s pretty unarousing and curiously uninvolving.  It’s cold, it’s clinical, austere.  But it’s intriguing.  It’s unafraid to be ambiguous, to ask questions it doesn’t have easy answers for.

Dark, beautiful and elusive, in Sleeping Beauty, Leigh and her muse Browning, have delivered an uneven but memorably provocative work,     

David Watson

Writer/Director

Julia Leigh

Cast

Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie, Peter Carroll, Chris Haywood

Country

Australia

Running time

101 minutes

Year

2011