Sleeping Beauty (2011) (Wednesday, January 25, 2012) (145)

Julia Leigh's sex rompy Sleeping Beauty should not be confused with Catherine Breillat's politico-Freudian film The Sleeping Beauty (the definite article is very important). The two films have very little to do with one another, aside from both having female protagonists. In the Leigh, Lucy (the super fetching Emily Browning) is a college student who works several odd jobs to make her way. She does medical experiments, works as a copy girl in an office, waits tables and turns tricks in nightclubs and for private clients.

One day she is hired by a fancy lady for a strange and secretive group of rich men in some elite and sex-focussed supper club. She's told to strip down to her underwear and pour wine in the fancy dining room, for which she's paid very well. The next day she is served a sedative and asked to lay down naked in bed while one of those old men uses her (with no penetration, leaving no scars, of course) until she wakes up. It's not clear what this sexual servitude means or what exactly happens, but, again, she's well paid for her work.

This film is what happens when someone only looks at Pasolini's Salo from a superficial perspective. In fact several of the set-ups seem to be taken directly from that film (particularly the post-dinner brandy session where two women curl up on the floor showing their anuses). I have to admit, I don't really get this film or what it's trying to say. Unlike with the Pasolini, there doesn't seem to be a strong political underpinning to the narrative, although the supper club members are clearly super rich and powerful. It seems that Leigh blushes a bit too much and doesn't go as far or as strong as PPP went in his film, as she shows only fleeting nudity and tries to remain decent as much as possible (though I'm sure Browning's contract also had something to do with that).

This is a lightly erotic film, but really only inasmuch as it shows a young woman with a tiny body in little or no clothes doing some near-sexual things (there's really no fucking, per se). This is yet another example of how filmmakers trade ellipsis for meaning, hoping you'll do most of the heavy lifting on your own. The problem here is that the story is so incomplete there is no way to fully understand it.

We can guess that the men in the supper club are rich masters of the universe and they have these strange interactions with young girls as a way of disproving their mortality, but we really have nothing to base this idea on aside from circumstance. Furthermore, as much as these men seem to be bourgeois and monied, Lucy and her peers are economically unknown, so there's not really a full Marxist argument being made.

Technically this is a totally gorgeous film (aside from Browning's own technical gorgeousness). The cinematography by Geoffrey Simpson is crisp yet dreamy. The costumes and production design (by Shareen Beringer and Annie Beauchamp, respectively) are perfect for the content (or suggested content) of the film and create lush and glamorous interiors.

I feel like Leigh is on the edge of having a very good movie here, but there is just too much left untold.

Stars: 2.5 of 4