SLEEPING BEAUTY (2011)

“Sleeping Beauty” is the brand new Australian film by first time director Julia Leigh.  It recently had the honour of playing at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where its reception there was, lets say, mixed.  Actually this film really rubbed some people the wrong way entirely.  Still, the trailer for the film intrigued me and it certainly looked interesting, and now that it has been released locally, I decided to check it out.

In the film we follow Lucy (Emily Browning), a university student, struggling to make ends meet financially.  She shares a house with two other students, but she is constantly falling short on her share of the rent.  To try and rectify the situation, she does a lot of low paying jobs such as being a waitress, filing, and even being a guinea pig in the experiments of a scientist.  It appears that Lucy doesn’t have many friends and her family life is not a happy one either (due to her mother’s alcoholism).  When Lucy isn’t clubbing, working or studying, she visits her only friend, Birdmann (Ewen Leslie).  From the strange conversations the two share, it is obvious that they have been friends for quite a long time, but it appears that something has happened to Birdmann causing him to be agoraphobic.  In fact it seems he lives his life just waiting for these visits from Lucy.

In an attempt to make significant more money, Lucy answers an advertisement in a paper and organises an interview for a high-paying but mysterious job.  After her body has been thoroughly examined, she is told by Clara (Rachael Blake) that she is to be hired to perform silver service at exclusive dinner parties held by the very rich.  The catch is that she will only be dressed in lingerie.  After hearing how much she will be paid, Lucy accepts the position, and Clara proceeds to explain that discretion and privacy is of the outmost importance, and if she does her job well, there is room for a “promotion”.

Lucy does very well at the dinner parties and becomes a favourite of the men and women who attend them, and soon enough, a “promotion” is offered to her.  The promotion is a strange one, she is to be voluntarily drugged unconscious and then placed in a bed completely naked.  From here, the paying guest may do what he wants to the young girl, with one exception, Lucy can never be sexually penetrated.  Lucy is initially taken aback by the offer, but again once she hears the amount she will be paid, along with the assurance that she would wake with no memory of what has happened to her while she is asleep, she agrees to the job.

At the beginning, it appears that Lucy is dealing with her strange new job very well, but as time goes on, she starts to worry more and more, and after waking up one time to find a burn mark on her neck, she begins to become very paranoid as to just what is being done to her while she sleeps.  She is determined to find out, and decides to buy a very tiny spy camera which she hides in the room before she falls asleep.  Just what will Lucy find out?

It is easy to see why “Sleeping Beauty” caused such extremely negative reviews when it screened at Cannes, and it all has to do with the ending.  There really is no satisfactory conclusion to the film, it just ends which is initially very frustrating.  It feels like a pointless exercise, we have been following Lucy on her journey that ends up leading to nowhere.  At the screening I was at, there was a strange silence as the credits began to roll.  You could just feel the disappointment in the room, with everyone thinking “C’mon, that can’t be it!”.  An ending stays with you, obviously because it is the last impression you take from a film, so when a film doesn’t end satisfactorily, you hold onto that negativity which is why I think the film reviewed poorly.  Personally, I was enjoying Lucy’s strange journey that she was on, but when the film finished, I was angry about the lack of a conclusion rather than focusing on the positives I had seen in the previous hour and a half.

Strangely, as I mentioned above, the ending is “initially” frustrating but after having some time to think about it and digest it some more, I now find it to be more rewarding.  The key to me is to compare the ending of the film with the ending of the original fairy tale.  In the fairy tale, the princess sleeps for 100 years after an evil fairy / witch puts a spell on her.  She is only awaken from her slumber and brought back to life by a kiss.  Referring this back to the film, Lucy appears to be “sleepwalking” through her life.  She has no ambition (that we know of) as she goes from job to job, while struggling to make ends meet.  She doesn’t appear to have a stable life and although there are times when she does show emotions, she still feels detached from life and from realizing the enormity of her situation (and some could say, her depression).  It is like she has bottled everything up from her life, so she feels no pain, and she is continually on the move, because she knows that when she stops, it will all come pouring out.  However, by doing all of this, she cannot fully embrace life (ie. She has stopped living).  What little of an ending there is in “Sleeping Beauty” I do not want to reveal, so I will be as vague as possible, but it is during the finale that Lucy finally wakes from her slumber, again like the fairy tale by a “kiss”, and we finally see her breakdown.  It has become too much for her and she has to let it all out, as she is forced to acknowledge the pain she is feeling.  Although it is obviously painful for Lucy, we can assume that this is the beginning of her catharsis, and that she is now finally awake and ready to face the world (ie. She is alive again).

“Sleeping Beauty” is a very cold film, both in the look of the film and emotionally.  There just is no warmth to be found here at all.  This is not a shock, because the trailer for the film accurately portrayed this.  In fact, it has a strange “Kubrickian” feel to it, especially an “Eyes Wide Shut” vibe to it (which I feel is a very cold film too).  The film is beautiful to look at (sorry, Tim), with some stunning cinematography from Geoffrey Simpson.  I especially liked the look of the room Lucy slept in when on the job.  The turquoise colour of the bedspread up against the creamy pale skin of Emily Browning just looked gorgeous.  Julia Leigh did not make her job easy because she decided to shoot the film in a style that relied on long single takes / shots.  She has shot no coverage which puts a lot of pressure on both, the actors and the director, because there is nowhere to hide, if it is not working there is nothing to cut away to.  It is a bold move (especially for a first time director), but I think it pays off handsomely because the visuals to “Sleeping Beauty” are its strongest element.

In terms of acting, this is Emily Browning’s film, as she is in every scene of the film.  Browning was last seen in the lead role of “Babydoll” in the embarrassing “Sucker Punch”.  She is much better in this (even though she was one of the strongest elements of “Sucker Punch”), but she is given much more to work with here in terms of an emotional arc.  In a recent interview I read with her, Browning stated that she was sick of people describing her nude scenes in the film as “brave”.  While I agree with her that her being nude is not really brave (and believe me, she is naked a lot in this film), it is the content within the scenes when she is nude that makes it “brave”.  Emily Browning was around the age of twenty when she shot this film and she has a couple of scenes while naked when she has a man aged 60+ also naked on top of her.  Personally I think this would be incredibly confronting for a young actress and because of this I would definitely describe her performance in these scenes as “brave”.  Aside from the nudity, Browning also has the tough job of making us feel something for Lucy, which isn’t an easy job because she is not the most likeable character due to the fact that she is so cold.  It actually makes you wonder what drew Browning to the material to want to make the film (interestingly, Mia Wasikowska was apparently originally cast as Lucy, but dropped out to do “Jane Eyre” instead).

The other main role of Clara is portrayed by Rachael Blake.  I must admit that I have never been a fan of Blake’s work and she hasn’t done much to change my opinion here.  She is alright but at times I think she looks a little uncomfortable in the role.

Overall, “Sleeping Beauty” is a hard film to enjoy.  The emotional coldness of the characters makes it hard to empathize with them and the fact that the ending is so disappointing makes it a hard film to recommend.  That doesn’t mean that there is nothing to get out of “Sleeping Beauty” because as I mentioned earlier, until the end, I was enjoying Lucy’s strange Alice-like journey into darkness and desire.  Combined with the gorgeous cinematography, there are some positives, but not enough for it to be a positive cinema experience.

3 Stars.