Review: Sleeping Beauty

Emily Browning plays a uni student behind on her rent who works three part-time jobs (in an office, a cafe, and as a lab rat). She applies for another job, this one a peculiar pseudo-bordello run by Rachael Blake where (mostly elderly) men pay to lie down with naked women, who are drugged. The girls are referred to as ‘sleeping beauties’. No penetration of any kind is allowed, however. At first, Browning is used as a waitress at parties for elderly men (and one woman) whom the girls serve wine to in lingerie that sees them topless. We see Browning with three clients over the course of the film, each with their own strange peccadilloes, ranging from rather tender (Peter Carroll) to careless (Hugh Keays-Byrne) to genuinely hostile (Chris Haywood). Then one day, Browning gets curious as to what goes on while she’s sedated...

 

Oh goodie, Australia is back to making pretentious, arty-farty crap again. Glorious. This stupefyingly silly 2011 film from writer-director Julia Leigh is highly regarded by the majority of critics at home, as filmmakers keep sucking up to them by offering up snooty, uber-pretentious crap that will fail to sell overseas. Hell, this one has divided audiences in my neck of the woods, don’t worry about overseas!

 

The whole idea of this film is beyond fatuous, and what truly irritates me is that to look at the plot synopsis is to ask the question: How is this not a Jess Franco sleaze-fest from Spain? I mean, add some lesbian sex scenes, an overuse of the zoom lens, and arm Chris Haywood’s dirty old perve character with some S&M gear and you’d have a Franco exploitation film. But noooo. This is Australian, it must be art! No, it’s trash masquerading as art. I love trash, I can appreciate art, but this? This is a pointless, sterile piece of shit (Hmmm, maybe that’s an achievement, then...). Besides, I think Australian filmmakers (and many critics) seem to think cinema is solely to be admired from afar and greeted with a polite ‘golf clap’. Perhaps some films are like that, but Australia makes too many of them (few of them worth seeing). Whatever happened to enjoyment and audience engagement? You won’t find that here, that’s for sure. Although petite, Emily Browning looks fantastic naked, but other than that, I got nothing out of this at all. It could’ve been sleazy fun for the kind of people who are into that kind of thing, but instead we get shrivelled up old men’s penises (which I’m sure have a profound, esoteric meaning), a dorky dinner scene reminiscent of the pretentious orgy from “Eyes Wide Shut” (and yes, that is Benita Collings from “Play School” as the lone elderly female at the table. I guess Noni Hazlehurst was busy at the time), a boring old fart (Peter Carroll) who stops to give a pointless and endless soliloquy about God knows what (the kind of theatrical/poetry nonsense that Australian cinema is sadly full of- cinema is not theatre!), and other arty farty nonsense that has no resemblance to any reality that you or I are a part of.

 

I mean, what kind of person works in an office, does a pseudo sex worker gig, and undergoes some kind of weird scientific experiments? (The other jobs add irrelevant asides to the film, nothing else) I know times are tough and people need to take more than one job sometimes, but couldn’t there be at least a little resemblance to reality? Please let me know if scenarios like this do happen in reality, but honestly, I couldn’t believe for a second that anyone would pay money to lie next to a girl without any penetration being involved at all (Yes, they are seemingly impotent old men, but I reckon that was more Leigh’s way of trying to get around not having any penetration involved more than a real necessity for the characters). And she’s drugged and completely unresponsive? Outside of sickos, I can’t see anyone deriving pleasure from this, and there seemed to be only one sicko in the film, the rest were just sad old men. I get the anonymity and not wanting to be judged, but they might as well have just gotten a blow-up sex doll for crying out loud. I just didn’t get it, and although I’ve heard the writer-director did her research, I can’t imagine it was anything outside of studying fairytales. The idea of drugging the girls is entirely ridiculous, no matter the literary reference. I just don’t see that happening in real life (Outside of the ‘date rape’ drug scenario, of course). Hell, why would anyone want to sit down to dinner, with several other grown adults (and by grown I mean elderly) whilst being served by topless women? I love naked women, I like food, but the mixture of the two here was just batty due to the cold and austere nature of it. I understand it was to get to the point of Browning being chosen as a ‘sleeping beauty’, but the actual dinner itself seems bizarre and completely pointless beyond furthering the plot.

 

Similarly, I don’t know why on Earth anyone would accept such a job, even if they were struggling. I mean, what kind of jobs would she have turned down before deciding on this one? That’s what I’d like to know. Just because she needs money, it doesn’t explain why she takes this job. I mean, she still keeps her other gigs, so it can’t even be said to be high-paying. Why bother taking on such an extreme job, then? Even without penetration, surely you’d still want to be earning a pretty penny for such degradation. Sadly, we don’t get any insight into the character’s inner workings from actress Emily Browning, who is cute but a blank slate (presumably on purpose) and not terribly likeable or identifiable. She’s completely ambivalent on screen. The whole film is similarly inaccessible and uninteresting, neither titillating, enlightening, emotionally charged, or entertaining in any way. It offers nothing, keeping one at a complete distance in every way imaginable. Like its protagonist, the film is entirely indifferent. Leaving a bit of homework for audiences is one thing, but there doesn’t seem to be anything at all here to take in, nothing worth taking in at the very least. You can’t leave all the work to the audience, otherwise why bother making the film at all? The film ends on a frustratingly inconclusive note, presumably just because it can. At least it’s in keeping with the rest, I suppose. The whole film plays like it’s in search of a purpose or profundity it never finds.

 

Rachael Blake gives an irritatingly arch, snooty and one-note performance, and her scenes are woefully repetitive. The whole film becomes repetitive after a while, but how many damn times did we have to listen to Blake tell the horny old buggers that penetration wasn’t allowed? Methinks Ms. Leigh (whose first film this is) likes the word ‘penetration’ and was going to have her actors use it as often as possible (Similarly, Browning is told to use lipstick that matches the colour of her ‘labia’...just so the word ‘labia’ can be mentioned). About the only clever thing about the film is its title, a cute play on words and the classic tale “Sleeping Beauty”, I guess. Other than that, I fail to see any point or message to this film at all. At least “Monkey’s Mask”, for all its pretentiously arty characters and wanky lesbian/poetry milieu had a point: the solving of a murder mystery.

 

It’s a beautiful-looking film (in an anti-septic Kubrick kinda way), well-lit by cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson (the similarly awful and arty “Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey”, which was even worse), but this is the kind of self-important shit that makes me love silly exploitation films all the more. At least they’re honest about what they are and don’t try to give us anything else, for the most part. This film takes an obvious softcore plotline, and then shoves it all up its own anus, there to be enjoyed only by those with their noses in the air and who like to hear the sound of their own voices as they pontificate on things like empowerment or disempowerment, passivity, the ‘female gaze’ and whatever else I had to endure in cinema studies class at uni. Credit where it’s due, though, the film is equally misogynistic towards men and women. Not sure how one manages to achieve that, but this film certainly does. I guess that’s some kind of achievement. 
 
Rating: D+