Here’s a strange one. Sleeping Beauty is by turns haunting, baffling, risible, voyeuristic, perverse, tender, and funny. It may well be a critique of modern young women and their willingness to submit to the desires of men; or a parody of the service industry taking the absurdities inherent in fine dining and raising them to a whole new level. It may even be a dream for at one point our sleeping beauty closes her eyes and the screen goes black.
Lucy (Emily Browning) is a pretty redheaded student who pays for her studies in a variety of ways. She submits to medical experimentation, works as a waitress in a café, a photocopier in an office, and occasionally prostitutes herself in nightclubs to guys who can’t believe their luck. Despite earning money she never pays the rent in her shared accommodation. Lucy is ambivalent, just drifting along, sleepwalking through life. There is a tender friendship with a withdrawn literary type (Ewan Leslie) but later she will deny this relationship when somebody asks her.
An advertisement for a waitress with silver service experience and a willingness to work wearing only skimpy lingerie catches her attention. Lucy is interviewed by Clara (Rachael Blake), a glamorous forty-something, who warns her about the importance of discretion. Lucy starts serving at weird dinner parties for older men, and one noticeably masculine looking female, in which they eat ludicrously prepared dishes overseen by a maître d who looks like a topless version of an extra from a Robert Palmer video.
“You will go to sleep: you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed”
Lucy agrees to become a sleeping beauty for Clara by drinking a tea which puts her to sleep for ten hours and is left naked in a bed for melancholy old men to peruse at their leisure. Though Clara has given Lucy her assurances no penetration will be allowed she remains unaware of what is happening as she sleeps. There is a disturbing sequence when one of these men becomes aggressive, burning her with a cigar, yet even though she is sleeping she seems the stronger of the two. He is impotent, ugly, and unlovable. Aware of it too no doubt and perhaps this fuels his rage.
Yet Julia Leigh is not unsympathetic to the vagaries of age. One man delivers a startling monologue about his weariness with life. What makes this moment more immediate is Leigh’s decision to cut from a two shot by having the actor directly face the camera as he begins to speak. Though in terms of the narrative he is talking to Clara, he is addressing us in close-up breaking the Fourth Wall between film and viewer and making us complicit in the action, another voyeur here to observe but never touch the heroine.
Sleeping Beauty is made up of static takes, the camera rarely moving, just watching and observing. The acting is non-realistic and underplayed and both Emily Browning and Rachael Blake are outstanding. The effect is unsettling and often this deadpan approach is very funny. Julia Leigh has managed to carry her writer’s voice into her filmmaking and Sleeping Beauty is an offbeat and striking directorial debut.
Rating 4/5
- Sleeping Beauty
- Starring Emily Browning, Rachael Blake
- Written by Julia Leigh
- Directed by Julia Leigh
- Running time 104 mins
- Year 2011
Kevin Sturton - Kevin is a graduate of the 2005 Post-Grad course in Film Journalism run by the BFI and writes mainly about film.
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