Will Means
Cannes Study Abroad
05/18/11
Film Review #2:
Sleeping Beauty
“There was no story to draw from it.” “It wasn’t what I expected.” “The trailer made me think it would be something completely different.” “I just couldn’t get passed the fact that she was a prostitute, but no penetration was allowed.” “I hated it.”
These are the reviews I have been hearing from friends and peers for Sleeping Beauty, the debut feature from Julia Leigh. It is seemingly one of the more controversial films that has shown at Cannes this year and critics, for the most part, have been divided on it. Many of these friends and critics went in expecting something in particular based off the trailer and the plot synopsis. The synopsis is as follows: “Sleeping Beauty is a haunting erotic fairytale about Lucy, a young university student drawn into a hidden world of beauty and desire.” From what I can deduce, this led many people to expect an erotic thriller of sorts. A suspenseful, fun, and sexy ride. However, Sleeping Beauty is not fun, not quite suspenseful, and despite the physical appeal of some of the actors, it is far from sexy.
It comes as no surprise that the film’s writer and director, Julia Leigh, was previously a novelist before she set out to take on this project. The film has many novelistic aspects, and what a lot of people seem to not be getting is that the film is an “iceberg movie”. When I say “iceberg movie” I am of course referring to the style that was created by writers like Ernest Hemingway, in which only about 20% of the story is considered to be obvious and in the open, while the other 80% is hidden beneath the surface. Sleeping Beauty does indeed ask its viewers to look beneath the surface and read between the lines in order to take anything from it. In fact, the majority of the story and the underlying theme of the film as a whole is delivered in one pivotal shot of extended dialogue, which many viewers seem to clock out during. Without this one scene, the film is nothing. The rest of the message is communicated through the film’s rich symbolism. This presents a problem for people who went in expecting Fatal Attraction for the new generation and were given a more focused and shorter version of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Eyes Wide Shut seems like the best comparison piece for Sleeping Beauty, as the latter is filled with reminders of Kubrick’s style (with a hint of Michael Haneke). The cinematography is nothing short of gorgeous, filled to the brim with symmetric shots, centered actors, and some rather lengthy tracking and still shots. All of this comes together to create a very hypnotic feel that really pulls you in. That is the part that calls to mind images of both Kubrick’s and Haneke’s work. Where Kubrick dominates though, is in the execution of the film. Lucy (played by Emily Browning) is a character that we can’t quite get a read on, and the audience is given virtually no opportunity to create an emotional attachment to her. Many people referred to Browning’s acting as dull and stale. They blamed her for the lack of emotional connection to her character, when in fact the whole point of the film is that you can’t connect to Lucy and you can’t get a read on her. She is supposed to be cold, and mysterious. Her actions and her physical presentation are the tip of the iceberg. We have to interpret and guess what is going on with the other 80%.
The film’s synopsis which mentions Lucy being drawn into a world of “beauty and desire” may lead one to believe she is going to visit a lot of strip clubs or start sleeping around with men. Instead the film presents a vision of a girl who is bored with life and goes out of her way to pursue daring and destructive tasks. She has her fair share of day jobs: a copy printer in an office building, a table-buster at a restaurant, a guinea pig for unsettling scientific experiments (involving a balloon being shoved down her throat), and a student at her university. At night she becomes a sexual firecracker, literally having sex with men at the flip of a coin until she gets so bored that she ultimately signs up for a more interesting line of work. The new work requires her to wait tables for prestigious house-party dinners in her lingerie until she is upgraded to a job in which she takes drugs that put her to sleep and old men climb into a bed with her and have their way with her…up to a certain extent. They are not allowed to “penetrate” her.
*SPOLER ALERT* This job continues for Lucy until the last scene when she is awoken from a near-fatal overdose and she comes screaming back to life. A man who took his own life lies dead in the bed next to her. This is the same man who has the extensive dialogue scene that explains the whole plot and focus of the film. In that scene, he tells the story of a man who was completely dissatisfied with life and could find not substance in it, so he changes his way of living. When that doesn’t work, he changes his way of living again, but soon becomes unhappy again. Not until the man almost dies in a car accident but survives does he come to appreciate life and see the value in it.
This is exactly what happens to Lucy. She can find no happiness and substance in her life. When she makes money from a job, she burns it for fun, as it has no significance to her. She pushes herself to her limits, trying one daring and dangerous thing after another until it all catches up with her in the end. She is beauty who is essentially sleeping through life, and it takes a near-death experience before this sleeping beauty is awoken/ reborn/whatever you want to call it, and comes screaming back to reality. The film’s themes and focus center around ideas of death, life, and what it takes to make one worth more than the other. Perhaps Lucy is sleeping through life because she feels dead already, but not until she sees true death does she come to realize the value in living.
Browning gives quite the bravura performance in the role as Lucy, doing a fine job of remaining icy and cold until life forces her to break down and release surprising and sudden fits of emotion (Not to mention that she also manages to not flinch once during the scenes where her body is being abused as she sleeps). The role is certainly a far cry from her child-actor days in things like A Series of Unfortunate Events, but Leigh also oversees Browning’s exposure well. When many people went to see Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise and Nichole Kidman were quite the tabloid couple, and viewers were excited to see them “get it on” and have sexy sex with each other in a sexy erotic movie. Kubrick, however, let audiences know that he was not about to cater to their curious voyeurism by making the first shot of his film one in which Kidman slides off her dress and is revealed as fully naked. It was as if he was saying, “There! Now that all the suspense behind what Kidman looks like naked is removed, can we please move on?” Leigh handles the nudity (which is quite ample) in her film in much the same way. Although we do not see Lucy naked in the opening shot, the camera does not shy away from her naked body, nor the naked bodies of any of the other characters. Also, interestingly enough, despite the fact that we know that the main character has a lot of sex, there is not actually one sex scene in the film. Not once is the act of sexual intercourse seen being performed. We only see the aftermath or what leads up to it. Leigh does a great job of turning what could have easily been a striptease of a film into one that handles nudity in a serious manner and makes sexuality disturbing on many levels. I think this is one of the big reasons why people rejected the film, just as viewers did with Eyes Wide Shut.
So while the film is a good focus on the disturbing side of sexuality and issues of life and death and how we spend our time getting from one to the other, it is not without its flaws. One of Lucy’s few real emotional connections with the character of Birdmann is lacking. The film doesn’t really allow one to feel any substance in their relationship. Although Lucy seems to care very much for Birdmann, the audience can’t really come to care for him at all and he just becomes a curious little side-plot for the story. The only purpose his character serves is to elaborate on the themes of death, life, and the space in between. This is just one of the examples of the many areas in the film where a little bit of emotional substance could have given the film a richness to really boost it a couple of levels. Again, this is where Kubrick’s style comes into play as, just as with a Kubrick film, we are not allowed to feel what a character feels, but instead we simply see them feeling certain things as we view their actions.
All in all, the film is a rather impressive debut for two obviously talented newcomers: the director and the lead actress. Browning’s role is seriously worth some consideration in the Cannes Best Actress title, but I’m sure it will be overlooked. Leigh has proven herself to be a strong force to look out for. Her film is indeed impressive, and it serves its purpose with its iceberg style. The biggest thing to worry about in regards to the film is not Leigh’s method of telling a story about a sleeping beauty, but rather all the viewers of the film who choose to sleep through some of the most pivotal moments of the film.
“Sleeping Beauty”
Runtime: 101 minutes
Director: Julia Leigh
Writer: Julia Leigh
Production Company: Screen Australia
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