Review: Sleeping Beauty (film)

The first offering from Julia Leigh is an arthouse masterpiece, a disturbing modern-day fairytale exploring what happens when men have access to a woman’s body but not her mind.

Emily Browning is hauntingly convincing as Lucy, an Australian student holding down several jobs to meet rent by day, but by the night she trawls upper-class bars, picking up rich men for sex and cocaine.

Responding to a job advert in a newspaper she spirals into a world of fetish-waitressing run by Clara, a wealthy madam. This leads to her occupation as a ‘sleeping beauty’ – Lucy is driven to a countryhouse, drugged to a temporary sleep and left as the play object of rich clients.

The cinematography is beautiful and almost makes up for when the plot fails. The lingering static shots are unsettling, making you feel like you’re a willing voyeur of the sexual gratification the men are so desperate for.

At times the film borders on distasteful pornography and the controversy the film seeks may be too much for the more faint-hearted of viewers. There are some humorous ploys with sexuality, a particular scene where Lucy is asked to colour her lips in the same shade as her Labia had the audience laughing, albeit awkwardly.

The lack of soundtrack works for this film, the silence enforcing the atmosphere set in this erotically secretive world.

The weakest part of the film falls on the storytelling of one of Clara’s elderly impotent client (his tale about author Ingeborg Bachmann is frustratingly drawn-out).

The ending may leave some disappointed, some uncomfortable or for the sexual-predators among you deadly-satisfied. That aside, Sleeping Beauty is definitely not recommended for a first date viewing.