Sleeping Beauty By Julia Leigh

Sleeping Beauty by debutant director Julia Leigh, also the author of the novel the film is based on, delivers highly polished visuals and breathtaking set design, but never fully awakens from its apathy.

The premise of the film is undeniably intriguing - a young student named Lucy gets a job as a ‘sleeping beauty’ which entails being drugged, falling asleep and then being presented to rich elderly gentlemen, who ‘amuse’ themselves with this scenario of violently sharing a bed with a passive young naked beauty. Emily Browning is nearly perfect in the part of Lucy, her almost childlike looks, cold distanced manners and forced sexuality convey a disturbing but effective feeling of sensuality and eroticism.

The super-stylishly executed cinematography and production design are breathtaking and at times it feels almost like viewing a commercial for a haute-couture brand – advertisements of Versace and Gucci for example very often also have the compulsory hint of similar decadence and vice. Unfortunately Sleeping Beauty suffers from superficiality (inherent to the haute-couture ads) as it is never quite able to really penetrate the highly polished surface, unlike Tom Ford’s A Single Man which managed to be both super-stylish and emphatic.

Of course there can be different interpretations to the subject matter - it could be read as a feminist narrative about the male fantasy of the passive female (taken to the extreme) or an exploration of female sexuality in the spirit of the works of Catherine Breillat or Jane Campion. But the in the end the film itself is so distanced and cool that the sensuality turns into dullness.

By Maria Ulfsak