Sleeping Beauty a Frustrating Enigma
In many ways Sleeping Beauty is a tough nut to crack. Not to be confused with the actual fairy tale (or the animated Disney masterpiece born from it), writer and director Julia Leigh’s debut is hauntingly photographed, beautifully designed, intimately scored and sensationally acted by lead Emily Browning. It is also, sadly, frustratingly, disappointingly and, most importantly, relentlessly boring. It is a movie where everything that is being said is supposed to be read between the lines, a movie where the unpronounced syllable is more important than the uttered ones. Problem is, neither of them prove to be all that interesting, and in final examination there’s so little of import or interest to talk about part of me is wondering why I’m even wasting the time to write this review.
Emily Browning (left) in Sleeping Beauty © IFC Films
Browning plays Lucy, a university student who pushes through life with a bizarre passivity that’s practically relentless. She flips a coin to decide whether or not to have a one night stand, takes a series of menial jobs to fund her studies and then goes through the motions of completing them as if she were a ghost lingering in the shadows. But when she inadvertently interviews for a job as a ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ a drugged paramour men pay many to lie next to but not sleep with while they linger there completely unconscious, a job she ultimately decides to take, the full weight of the mundane malaise she’s been drifting through finally comes to bear upon her.
The movie is lensed to perfection by Geoffrey Simpson (Last Holiday), the cinematographer achieving a startling intimacy within the world of the narrative that is almost breathless in its immediacy. The art direction and production design are equally stunning, while Ben Frost’s (In Her Skin) minimalist score gives proceedings a pulsating undulating rhythm that is as hypnotic as it is uncomfortable. But best of all is Browning’s fearless, uncompromising central performance, the actress more than making up for the stench of Sucker Punch (although, thematic similarities between the two films are borderline undeniable) reminding me exactly what it was I saw in her when she appeared in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events back in 2004.
All the same Leigh, an accomplished author making the transition to film, has crafted a scenario that’s so enigmatic and facile I kept expecting it to fracture into a million pieces at any given moment. There’s an idea here, something tenderly uncomfortable in the vein of a Robert Bresson or Michelangelo Antonioni drama, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to spending every single second of the film’s 194-minute running time trying to discern what it might be. But in all honesty I could never find it, couldn’t wrap my mind about why I should care or what the point of it all was, and that was a problem that continually frustrated me first frame to last.
There is a moment I did adore, one that I think could have meant something to the larger picture had Leigh chosen to develop it more and spend some time analyzing Lucy’s potential reactions to it. Veteran character actor Peter Carroll (The Last Wave, Waking Ned Devine) appears as the heroine’s first client, his hallowed form sitting on the edge of the bed resting next to the virtually lifeless form laying there. He delivers a monologue that strikes right to the core of things, hits at ideas and concepts that could have taken the film to an unforeseen plateau. Instead, Leigh doesn’t do anything with the character, at least nothing that mattered to me, and the ultimate effect he ends up having on Lucy is a sadly negligible one.
I will say this for Sleeping Beauty, for all my reticence to embrace it and my frustrations revolving around its ultimate designs it is a movie that has, for whatever reason, refuses to leave me alone. Leigh has given me something to ponder here, has delivered plenty food for thought that I’ve been trying to clean off my plate for a good three or four weeks now. On that front, I guess the director’s debut has to be considered something of a success, and while I can’t recommend a person pay for a ticket I can almost guarantee those who do will at the very least feel like they’ve spent their hard-earned dollars on a motion picture that hasn’t entirely put waste to them.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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