Review of Sleeping Beauty starring Emily Browning.
Emily Browning provides a fresh and dreamlike take on the world’s oldest profession in SLEEPING BEAUTY.
Emily Browning wears very little clothes in director Zack Snyder’s recent video game-inspired adventure Sucker Punch but it’s all for the sake of fan boy titillation.
The 22-year-old Australian actress is also naked throughout author and first-time filmmaker Julia Leigh’s brothel-set drama Sleeping Beauty but the impact is far more thoughtful, somewhat dreamlike and serious- minded.
Lucy (Browning) is an Australian college student working multiple service jobs in order to pay the bills and agrees to join an escort service to earn much-needed extra money.
A job as a lingerie-clad server at a private club leads to its operator, Madame Clara (Rachael Blake) hiring Lucy to be a sleeping beauty, someone who lies drugged and naked on a bed so the brothel’s wealthy clients can do whatever they wish, well, anything outside of penetration.
Lucy takes the job for the money as well as a burning fascination with Madame Clara and her brothel. Then, Lucy wants to know the truth about what happens to her when she’s asleep and the knowledge comes at high price.
Browning is a familiar face thanks to her roles in Hollywood extravaganzas Sucker Punch and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (she played Violet Baudelaire) as well as childhood roles on Australian TV.
Leigh and cameraman Geoffrey Simpson may focus on Bronwing’s alabaster skin but it’s her sad, doe eyes and cold approach to her job at hand that make the biggest impact in the movie.
Leigh is the author of The Hunter, about a scientist tracking the believed-to-be instinct Tasmanian tiger, and Disquiet, an intentionally gothic tale about a woman reuniting with her estranged mother.
Sleeping Beauty is being promoted as a film “presented by Jane Campion” and the connection to the director of The Piano makes sense.
Like Campion, Leigh is a skilled storyteller of complex female characters so it’s no surprise that Sleeping Beauty is a wordy and literate-minded sex drama.
Long conversations between Lucy and Madame Clara are just as important to the story as the scenes between Lucy and her elderly male clients.
A haunting score by Ben Frost emphasizes the strange, fairytale spirit of the movie even more.
Sleeping Beauty is also a challenging film and like all challenging fare it will divide audiences.
Still, Leigh keeps the sexual fantasies quaint rather than hardcore, far removed from the more sensational sex dramas by contemporary filmmakers Catherine Breillat (Anatomy of Hell), Gaspar Noe (Into the Void) and Bruno Dumont (Twentynine Palms).
Leigh also pulls the story away from the domain of many male psychiatrists (Kinsey, Kraft-Ebing), authors (The Brothers Grimm, Arthur Schnitzler) and offers a female gaze instead.
Sleeping Beauty may be a familiar story of erotic requests, powerful fetishes and male obsession with women but Leigh and Browning offer a fresh and thoughtful take on a drama set in a high-end brothel.
In fact, one of the film’s most powerful scene occurs at its beginning as Lucy sits back as a medical lab test subject and allows the doctors who insert a tube far down her throat.
It’s an unnerving scene and a sly, powerful metaphor by Leigh pointing out that penetration can occur in many different ways.
Distributor: IFC Midnight
Director: Julia Leigh
Scriptwriter: Julia Leigh
Cinematographer: Geoffrey Simpson
Cast: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie, Peter Carroll and Chris Haywood
Editor: Nick Meyers
Production Designer: Annie Beauchamp
Composer: Ben Frost
Running Time: 101 minutes
Producers: Magic Films
Rating: Unrated