Precisely staged but maddeningly obtuse, "Sleeping Beauty" is an artful exercise in pointlessness.
Australian novelist Julia Leigh's first feature as writer and director has an admittedly voyeuristic allure. Lucy ("Sucker Punch" star Emily Browning), a college student of pristine, porcelain beauty, engages in a series of increasingly odd, odd jobs to pay the bills before becoming a lingerie-clad wine-server at elite dinners and, eventually, an unconscious plaything for wealthy old men.
Yes, you read that right. Lucy answers an ad in the university newspaper and Clara (Rachael Blake), the conservative, older woman who hires her for these creepy, private soirees, finds Lucy so blankly lovely, she figures she'd be the ideal candidate to serve as a "sleeping beauty" for her clients. All she has to do is take a drug that sedates her, climb naked into bed and let these men do as they wish with her ? although as Clara assures her, there will be no penetration. Lucy is told: "You will go to sleep. You will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed."
Leigh depicts this surreal descent matter-of-factly, through assured, long takes in which the camera quite often just holds still and takes in the kinky trappings of this rarefied world. In that regard, it's similar to this week's "Shame," in which a sex-addict's spiral is presented in mesmerizingly cool aesthetic fashion. But Michael Fassbender's character undergoes an evolution ? or rather devolution ? and he's such an excellent actor that he finds both power and subtlety within this troubled figure.
Browning, meanwhile, reveals nothing ? when she's awake, she's so passive that she may as well be asleep ? even as her character snorts coke with a strange woman in a nightclub bathroom or lets a coin toss determine which random, middle-aged man she'll sleep with that night. These are merely a series of interludes leading to nothing, and in retrospect seem as if they're aiming to shock us for shock's sake.
Leigh takes the character into deeper and more dangerous psychological territory, but Lucy is such a cipher it's impossible to tell, or care, whether this journey is taking any sort of toll on her. Ambiguity can be appealing and challenging and all, but "Sleeping Beauty" takes that approach to frustrating extremes, which ultimately proves irreparable.
And it makes you wonder what Leigh was trying to say here. As a female filmmaker (with Jane Campion's seal of approval above the title), she's fetishizing the notion of a gorgeous, young woman as a living doll, someone whose naked body is meant to be manipulated and discarded. If she's suggesting that Lucy derives power from this arrangement because she agreed to it and she's getting paid for her services, that also ends up being a jumbled notion, since at one point Lucy unceremoniously burns some of her newly earned cash.
It's all too empty to achieve the disturbing effect it seeks.
"Sleeping Beauty," an IFC Films release, is unrated but contains sexual situations, nudity, drug use and language. 104 minutes. Two stars out of four.
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