Sleeping Beauty
Written and Directed
by: Julia Leigh
Starring: Emily
Browning, Rachael Blake, and Peter Carroll
Director of Photography: Geoffrey Simpsons, Editor: Nick
Meyers, Production Designer: Annie Beauchamp, Original Music: Ben Frost
Rated: Not Rated,
but a “children’s” fairy tale this is not.
Lucy,
the quiet and seemingly self-assured protagonist of Sleeping Beauty, is not one to care what happens to her body. In
the film’s opening scene, she participates as a lab rat where a research
assistant sticks some sort of long contraption down her throat, all the way
down to her stomach. Phallic intentions need not be mentioned, but Lucy doesn’t
mind; as long as she gets paid for her work, she has no interest in how her
body is used.
And
Sleeping Beauty, the first film from
an Australian novelist named Julia Leigh (and produced by Jane Campion), is a
commentary on the female body with its extremely cryptic narrative involving
the story of a woman who is willingly used and abused by those around her. Ms.
Leigh is obviously making a feminist parable, but her choices of how we can
read the film are so slight and never made explicit that the film is
undoubtedly watchable and impossible to ignore. Whether you like the film or
not could be a divisive question, but Ms. Leigh and her star Emily Browning
have made a film that is certainly going to challenge you at every step.
The
choice of Ms. Browning within this narrative might make some recall the disastrous
Sucker Punch, which also told a story
about female pleasure as a commodity. Of course, Ms. Leigh has a much stronger
understanding of such issues than that film’s director, Zack Snyder. Ms.
Browning’s Lucy is a college student in need of dire cash. Her mother, who
remains off screen but always in her mind, is a struggling alcoholic, as well
as her ex-boyfriend whom she plays a series of odd games with at his apartment.
To pay her tuition and rent, she works a number of jobs, including as a
waitress and a legal assistant. Not to mention she also seems to work as a
prostitute on the side as she coyly approaches wealthier men at a fancy bar.
But
one day she finds an ad for a special type of job—we only here on the phone
that she is told to describe herself as “slim” and “fair.” When she goes to the
interview, which is at first described an erotic waitress, the employer
explains that she will not be penetrated. “Your vagina is a temple,” she is
assured, though disagrees with. As it turns out, Lucy’s job eventually
gravitates to one where she drinks a chemical that puts her into a coma-like
sleep, in which men then spend the night with her. The idea is that the men are
free to do whatever they want with no one—not even the sleeping Lucy—watching
them.
Ms.
Leigh never lets the exact details of what motivates Lucy known to us, and Ms. Browning’s
performance plays coy as well. She keeps herself as cryptic as the narrative
herself, and only allows for a few slight moments a crack in her calm and
collected façade. Similarly, Ms. Leigh’s camerawork never offers details. Rarely
using editing, Ms. Leigh decidedly allows most shots in the film to play out in
long shots with the characters sting or standing in the center of the frame.
It’s both the film’s best and worth decision: it shows a certain self-control
by Ms. Leigh, but it also loses the chance for her to really dig deeper into
her narrative with more visual detail, though the art direction by Annie
Beauchamp certainly provides plenty to look at.
As
Lucy digs deeper into her job and becomes more committed to it due to her
financial duress, Sleeping Beauty
becomes more of a horror fable about a lack of female self-worth and the way
that the idea that the female body is one for a female to control every aspect
might not be the best idea. When we see what these men do when Lucy sleeps,
it’s a frightening experience for which Ms. Browning is literally thrown
around. Ms. Leigh never lets us into what’s going on underneath her own
surface, but this only digs us deeper into this narrative. Whatever Sleeping Beauty is, it is full of
narrative details that I will want to explore for days and weeks to come.
Feminist parable through the eyes of misogyny? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Ms.
Leigh has her own answers I’m sure, but she’d rather see them debated as the
lights come up.
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