REVIEW: Strange, Hypnotic Sleeping Beauty Sends No Apparent Message -- Fortunately

When Australian author-director Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty made its debut at Cannes last May, the responses among experts I spoken to veered from bland outrage to vexed monotony. That doesn’t leave plenty of middle ground, which i desired to determine Sleeping Beauty again before I used to be reasonably sure a few things i considered it. I’m still not reasonably sure a few things i contemplate it: The look is clinical within the approach which is technique, yet it leaves lots of questions not-clarified — it’s straightforward in the vague, maddening way. It’s also oddly, obliquely compelling. Emily Browning — who recently came out just like a small-skirted vixen warrior in Sucker Punch and, a few years before that, as Crimson in Lemony Snicket’s Numerous Unfortunate Occasions — plays Lucy, a continuously broke Australian college student who must execute a patchwork of jobs to settle the debts. She also provides an unusual mishmash of pals whose particular roles in their existence should never be clearly referred to: There’s some science dude in the lab coat who’s grateful they’ll permit him to regularly drop a narrow tube way lower her throat there’s furthermore a shy, bookish shut-in gent (carried out by Ewen Leslie) who’s thrilled when she involves visit him — and not because she flows him a bowlful of cereal decorated liberally with vodka. Nevertheless the central occasions of Lucy’s existence at this time around are episodes through which she literally sleeps: After reacting to some newspaper ad, she becomes the worker of Clara (Rachael Blake), a awesome blonde Tippi Hedren lookalike who’s a madam of sorts. Lucy’s first gig with Clara involves wearing pale vanilla lingerie that seems as if it were built of spun sugar and flowing brandy for many leering, clearly wealthy oldies. (Her compatriots in this particular exercise are bare-breasted brunettes with slicked-back hair from the Robert Palmer video.) Then Clara enlists Lucy for just about any different kind of work: Lucy is drugged, along with her consent, having a couple of unknown powder taken into a cupful of tea. Then, in their slumber, she’s placed naked beneath the coverlet from the golden-brocade bed mattress. Clara’s clients — mostly the identical wealthy oldies seen earlier — can buy time while using “sleeping beauty,” there is however one strict rule: They cannot penetrate her. They could, however, talk dirty to her, lift her up and drag her around, or just nestle silently alongside her. And you'll wager they're doing all people things. Lucy’s curiosity eventually can get the higher of her, that literally brings the film to have an unforeseen and oddly tender climax. But through everything, you’re vulnerable to request, after i did: Exactly what are you doing here? And why? The greater I consider Sleeping Beauty, the higher I admire Leigh due to not being released getting a significantly defined motive or message. It wouldn’t be difficult to constitute some blah-biddy blah-blah explication of Sleeping Beauty through getting a few convenient feminist-lit code words about women’s agency if the involves their sexuality, or perhaps the possessive character of male desire, or somesuch. However think Sleeping Beauty is much better experienced as a little of fragmented poetry instead of a strict ideological tract. Visually, it’s a perfect little bit of craftsmanship: As shot by DP Geoffrey Simpson, the look features a pearlescent, dreamy glow, specially when it calls for Browning’s impossibly peachy skin, which there’s a good deal. The majority of the movie’s plans are painterly, and Browning herself is kind of a Burne-Manley heroine to use it. Her performance here's measured and controlled mostly, her character just allows products to happen to her, barely responding. That’s part of the idea, possibly: Lucy can be a receptor, even though she appears to own taken charge of her sexuality (she sleeps with whomever sherrrd like, picking males up in bars if the suits her), she really hasn’t a concept what she’s doing. The reason, possibly, is always that there’s something so mysterious about libido that doesn't probably the most contemporary freethinkers within our midst can ever totally appreciate it. Maybe that’s really all this semi-surreal, hypnotic picture is about. And possibly that’s enough. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.