Features > Movie Reviews > Sleeping Beauty…

An Australian novelist making her first film as writer and director, Leigh impressed Jane Campion so much that she lent her name to the project and helped find it a berth in the main competition at Cannes. Undoubtedly Campion’s name helps get the film noticed, but it may also set up high expectations this strange but slightly stilted movie struggles to justify.

Emily Browning – the doll-faced child actress who graduated from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events to Sucker Punch earlier this year – plays Lucy, a rather vaguely drawn – or simply, unformed – university student who is struggling to make ends meet. She’s squabbling with her flat-mates, working several menial jobs and volunteering for medical research that involves having a long tube inserted down her throat (a brilliant opening scene that shows her ability to disconnect herself mentally from her body).

Things get more interesting when she’s interviewed by Clara (a splendidly icy and august Rachel Blake), who asks Lucy to strip then offers her a job requiring the utmost discretion. It also entails silver service skills, and the ability to expose your derriere without smirking. Lucy is intrigued, and more than intrigued, broke, so she takes the gig and finds herself working at a kind of upscale Playboy club. But this, it turns out, is just the entry-level job. Promotion takes you up to the big house, where things get really kinky…

Apparently Leigh took inspiration for the story from a dream, or a nightmare. She seems to be angling for that kind of slow, somber surrealism of Bunuel’s Belle de Jour or David Lynch at his most restrained. But she’s not that accomplished a director, yet – and with its mostly static camera and antiseptic compositions the film sometimes drifts into somnolence. The scenes of Lucy’s everyday life – at work, or an odd truncated subplot about her caring for a dying friend – are particularly sterile and it’s frustrating that she scarcely emerges as an active character in her own right. Of course that may well be Leigh’s point: that women are passive victims of patriarchal system, or, like Clara, they’re selling their sisters to the highest bidders.

But the film is most effective in its quietly ugly, anti-erotic chamber pieces: a series of one-sided encounters between Lucy (who is drugged asleep) and Clara’s mostly old and all but impotent clients, who are allowed their way with her so long as they refrain from penetration. It’s a weird set up, but one that does throw a cold hard light on what men (think they) want from women.

In the end, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t know where to go or what to make of its slumbering princess. But there’s enough here to make you understand why Leigh wanted to make the movie, even if the dream still seems an inch or two out of reach.