The very first scene of Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty - a clinical test being administered in a pristine college laboratory - sets not only the tone and mood of Ms. Leigh's film but additionally allows the viewer to quickly estimate the director's game. And as much as Michael Bay's bombastically moronic Transformers: Dark of the Moon or, more accurately, Zach Snyder's deplorable Sucker Punch, Sleeping Beauty is much more of a game, played presumably for Ms. Leigh's pleasure, than it is a film of any sociological, psychological or political fascination. Characters move in strategic patterns, in lockstep with the turns and careful development of the plot, which is encased in Leigh's skilled, yet anesthetized sense of line, color and framing. Even Ben Frost's eerie score seems cut precisely. as if cut with a scalpel.
Indeed, there is a sense that Leigh approaches her filmmaking much like
the lead server at the perverse, upscale dinner party that the film's
quasi-eponymous heroine, Lucy (Emily Browning), finds herself working to
help pay the bills. The lead server insists that Lucy take the
application of her lipstick seriously, matching the color of the
high-end lingerie she's told to wear as she serves wine and brandy to a
gathering of rich old white men; they are, as you may suspect, referred
to as Man 1, 2 and 3 in the credits. The job was handed down to Lucy by
Clara (Rachel Blake), a facilitator of these parties and other odd
requests of the flesh by the peculiar wealthy. The film's title refers
to the most popular of these requests: Lucy is to be sedated for a night
while a client is allowed to do anything he likes with her, excluding
penetration and anything that leaves a mark.
As frigidly bogus as these rich men are, they don't hold a candle to Lucy, who is portrayed as a self-loathing sad sack who is in love with a dying alcoholic and, though flush with cash, enjoys burning the rent money she owes her flat-mates. She responds sexually only to the most aggressive and repugnant of men, flirts with women, freezes out her wayward mother and refuses to quit her copy-girl day job while waiting, breathlessly, to be fired. There is Haneke-like detachment dripping from nearly every scene but the film's ends are so obvious and devoid of nuance that any and all observational mystery is lost, swallowed up by a borderline laughable sense of art as artifice.
There are also heavy notes of Catherine Breillat's barbed sexual identities, not to mention the French master's sense of color. But whereas Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty, which opened earlier this year, toyed with the rabid psychological underpinnings of youth and gender with the filmmaker's requisite mercilessness and unbound narrative spontaneity, Leigh, who also wrote the film, sees fit to take her story of humiliation, cruelty, emotional detachment and masochistic femininity without even an iota of genuine humanity. Everything about the film, right down to the preposterously silly final quarter, smacks of an overwhelming self-seriousness that bleeds into an abysmal smugness and any hopes that Ms. Leigh has for us to find either her lead character or her aesthetic compelling is lost not long after Browning plainly offers to go down on some end-of-the-bar shlub because he had the balls to sit next to her.
It must be said that the overwhelming failure of the film, as in Sucker Punch, is not the fault of Ms. Browning, who shows a beguiling devotion to the role of Lucy from frame one. The role, unfortunately, doesn't add up to much of anything, which is essentially the problem with Sleeping Beauty. As a screed against masculine cowardice, brutality and pride, it's juvenile and lacks the bravery to create complex characters on either side of the gender war. As a character study, it's stunningly empty and one-note. I'm ultimately lead to believe that the point of the film is to align the viewer with the men who molest Lucy as she sleeps, a cheap trick that Leigh doesn't even slightly earn and which few directors have the formal ingenuity to handle with true provocation. The only thing Sleeping Beauty provoked me to think was what, if anything, was I expected to care about in this cynical, deeply unconvincing land of the dead.
As frigidly bogus as these rich men are, they don't hold a candle to Lucy, who is portrayed as a self-loathing sad sack who is in love with a dying alcoholic and, though flush with cash, enjoys burning the rent money she owes her flat-mates. She responds sexually only to the most aggressive and repugnant of men, flirts with women, freezes out her wayward mother and refuses to quit her copy-girl day job while waiting, breathlessly, to be fired. There is Haneke-like detachment dripping from nearly every scene but the film's ends are so obvious and devoid of nuance that any and all observational mystery is lost, swallowed up by a borderline laughable sense of art as artifice.
There are also heavy notes of Catherine Breillat's barbed sexual identities, not to mention the French master's sense of color. But whereas Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty, which opened earlier this year, toyed with the rabid psychological underpinnings of youth and gender with the filmmaker's requisite mercilessness and unbound narrative spontaneity, Leigh, who also wrote the film, sees fit to take her story of humiliation, cruelty, emotional detachment and masochistic femininity without even an iota of genuine humanity. Everything about the film, right down to the preposterously silly final quarter, smacks of an overwhelming self-seriousness that bleeds into an abysmal smugness and any hopes that Ms. Leigh has for us to find either her lead character or her aesthetic compelling is lost not long after Browning plainly offers to go down on some end-of-the-bar shlub because he had the balls to sit next to her.
It must be said that the overwhelming failure of the film, as in Sucker Punch, is not the fault of Ms. Browning, who shows a beguiling devotion to the role of Lucy from frame one. The role, unfortunately, doesn't add up to much of anything, which is essentially the problem with Sleeping Beauty. As a screed against masculine cowardice, brutality and pride, it's juvenile and lacks the bravery to create complex characters on either side of the gender war. As a character study, it's stunningly empty and one-note. I'm ultimately lead to believe that the point of the film is to align the viewer with the men who molest Lucy as she sleeps, a cheap trick that Leigh doesn't even slightly earn and which few directors have the formal ingenuity to handle with true provocation. The only thing Sleeping Beauty provoked me to think was what, if anything, was I expected to care about in this cynical, deeply unconvincing land of the dead.
