A whiff of creepiness perfumes every scene of this film, a distinct eau de perv. It’s a very bizarre drama about erotic ritual and male obsession: ridiculous in some ways, and naïve about bought sex, but very watchable and eerie. This is an Australian picture, written and directed by the novelist and first-time film-maker Julia Leigh (mentored by Jane Campion), but it has a distinctly European sheen, a feel for rectilinear compositions, deep focus and receding perspective lines in brightly lit interiors – and all with a sense of impending horror or disgust. Leigh is distantly influenced by Luis Buñuel, but more by contemporaries like Ulrich Seidl and Michael Haneke. When the characters speak, it is a big surprise to hear Australian-accented English, and not Austrian-accented German.The action – as preposterous and deadly serious as a recounted dream – concerns Lucy, played by Emily Browning, a beautiful young student. To make some cash, she holds down various part-time jobs, in a bar, an office, and a medical lab where she is a volunteer, and submits to a thin plastic tube being inserted down her throat. This opening scene is the film’s most disturbing sequence, a harrowing display of penetration that will test any audience’s gag reflex and which sets up the rest of her freelance portfolio nicely. Lucy has got into the high-end escort scene, sitting in upscale bars, doing a little coke with people she meets, having sex for money with creepy guys, before going back to her scuzzy student house.
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Then Lucy hits the big time: making real money from a quasi-necrophiliac cult for rich people, presided over by Clara (Rachael Blake), an elegant madame. All she has to do is lie drugged and naked on a bed in a mansion, while a wealthy old client disports himself with her lovely body however he wishes – but he is forbidden to penetrate. In the morning, she will remember nothing. Eventually, Lucy becomes obsessed with finding out what is being done to her and increasingly agonised by a tender, private friendship which in its twisted way is the nearest she gets to a normal life. Is all this sex work a way of cauterising secret fear and guilt?
In a way, Sleeping Beauty is a very unmodern film, a throwback to the artporn and chateau-erotica of the 1970s, epitomised by the delirious, and once much-banned fantasies of Walerian Borowczyk: Immoral Tales and The Beast. The idea of wealthy tuxed gentlemen paying over the odds for sex or sexy situations with unclothed young women in chic and tasteful surroundings may seem pretty quaint, and Stanley Kubrick was himself mocked for these ideas in his last movie Eyes Wide Shut. The idea of wealthy men thoughtfully submitting to the no-penetration rule, often after some elaborate and cultured dialogue, is also a bit strained. In the real world, big-spending customers in the sex industry expect to exercise all the prerogatives of the rapist with trafficked or exploited women. Yet Leigh carries off her semi-surreal fantasy, mostly, just by keeping it utterly deadpan. She audaciously tests her audience’s patience, quite a bit, by preceding one sex scene with an extended dialogue about the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann. This scene has caused many to groan, and yet it is all part of Leigh’s elegant, asymmetric style.The absence of penetration, a kind of rhyming idea with the awful plastic tube scene, is insisted upon with almost parental concern by Clara: “Your vagina is a temple,” she says, to Lucy’s bemusement. (Both times I’ve watched this film, I’ve not been able to suppress a horribly inappropriate snigger at the memory of a Kenneth Williams routine: “My body is a temple!” “Darling, more like a friends’ meeting house!”)
Yet the whole point is that no one needs to forbid penetration, not with a penis anyway. These old guys don’t have a hope of getting it up. Some of the really explicit moments come when the elderly customers remove their clothing and get into bed with the dormant Lucy. In contrast to her perfection, their bodies are shrivelled and wrinkled and in one case, the penis is almost non-existent, disappearing into a greying pubic fluff. Leigh’s film exerts a brutal and tactless power in just showing this body in a context which denudes its nakedness of dignity. If there’s a feminist revenge … well, here it is.
Sleeping Beauty is no more than the sum of its parts, and the last part, the ending, is not entirely satisfying. But it is well acted and well made and Rachael Blake and Emily Browning, in their differing ways, carry off their parody mother-daughter relationship with complete confidence. It’s not really erotic, perhaps more a thanatotic black comedy about how men distract themselves from the thought of imminent death: how they behave, or would like to behave, when they have money and status but no youth.This article was amended on Friday October 14 2011. Jane Campion was not a producer on Sleeping Beauty as we originally stated. She was involved as a mentor on the project. This has been correctedJulia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty is exactly the kind of film I hate. Made by an amateur Australian novelist-turned-filmmaker named Julia Leigh, who shouldn’t be directing and, perhaps, should never direct again. It’s bland, boring, tasteless, has a story about as thin as thread, is full of pointless fade outs and lacks more than 10 seconds of music in the entire film (which I cannot stand). I guess the redeeming value, if there was one, is that Aussie actress Emily Browning is naked in nearly every scene. But not even for good reason. A highly anticipated Cannes film and yep, it was awful, and I actually have something to say about it this time.Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be chauvinistic and say that the nudity was all that kept me hooked (because it didn’t, it wasn’t even that exciting). I would love to even try and explain some of the plot but that’s quite a challenge because… there isn’t one. Browning (last seen in Sucker Punch) plays a young Australian girl who, although she works three side jobs and is apparently taking college classes as well, decides to join a ‘brothel for old people’ – which is honestly the best description for it. (But they can’t have sex with her.) Why does she join? No reason. Does it lead anywhere? Nope. That’s all the movie is. Period.
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