Film Review - Sleeping Beauty

For all the hoop-la that has greeted it, both at Cannes and the recent Sydney Film Festival, novelist Julia Leigh’s directorial debut is a strangely lifeless affair.  Marketed as an erotic reimagining of the classic fairy tale and bearing a stamp of approval from Leigh’s cinematic mentor Jane Campion, Sleeping Beauty might have been mesmerising.  Unfortunately it perturbs more than it engages, elliptically gesturing towards a significance that it steadfastly refuses to represent.

The somnambulist of the title is Lucy (Emily Browning), a 20-something university student. Juggling various casual jobs as a waitress, photocopy clerk and participant in medical experiments, she breaks up her brittle routine by picking up businessmen in bars or visiting her bookish friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie), an alcoholic misfit with whom she shares some measure of platonic intimacy, the pair united in mocking a comfortable middle class existence from which they seem excluded.

Behind in the rent in her shared house, Lucy answers an advertisement for a position requiring “mutual trust and discretion” from Clara, an imperiously coiffed madam (Rachael Blake). Initially, wearing little but her knickers, she is required to provide silver service to three extremely wealthy old men (Peter Carroll, Chris Haywood and Hugh Keays-Byrne), but is soon offered a ‘promotion’: to lie naked in a drugged sleep while each man does what he will with her. Lucy glibly accepts, blithely asserting that “my vagina is not a temple” to Clara’s oddly prudish assurances that no sex will ensue.

Leigh has said that she strove to create a “tip of the iceberg” feel to the film and indeed, at times it seems to consist entirely of immaculately gleaming surface. Shot in Sydney, the film is bereft of any clear indicators of place, what action there is unfolding within anonymous public spaces or bland, depersonalised private ones. Although many scenes are inflected with unmistakably local touches, for all intents and purposes it could be set anywhere in the western world, Leigh striving to hit an allegorical note unmoored from historical reality.

The script draws heavily from literary touchstones, the tender but impotent nostalgia of the first old man self-consciously echoing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Memories of My Melancholy Whores and Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, both cited by Leigh as important influences. However, her heroine’s determined complicity also recalls Angela Carter’s supernatural version of the tale "The Lady of the House of Love." Like Carter’s vampiric protagonist, Lucy is wilfully passive, “indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming.” In this sense she might be considered what Carter referred to as a “Sadeian Woman,” Leigh using her character’s self-destructiveness as a means of tracing the logic of sexual and economic exploitation. It’s hardly accidental that once she obtains her first payment Lucy burns the money.

Sleeping Beauty is a visually sumptuous and technically assured film. Julia Leigh has benefited from the strong support of an experienced team, including production direction by Annie Beauchamp (Disgrace, Praise), editing by Nick Meyers (Balibo, The Bank) and exquisite cinematography by Geoffrey Simpson (Romulus, My Father, Shine). Their talents combine to lend the film, particularly the scenes in the lavish mansion in which Lucy’s slumberous encounters occur, a plush but austere beauty.

Leigh’s penchant for immaculately composed shots, held well beyond the requirements of narrative, conjures a mood of brooding watchfulness reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s brilliant Hidden (RT75). In that film the director meticulously crafted an air of patient stillness, the implacable, unseen camera reversing the historical power dynamic of French colonialism with eventually devastating results. Sleeping Beauty is similarly deliberate, the camera being as unwavering on the withered bodies of the men as on Browning’s naked form. Although it may be at times uncomfortable to watch, Leigh seems willing to only go so far—her depiction of the sole instance of outright physical abuse (a cigarette burn) is constructed to obscure what it simultaneously depicts, an approach characteristic of the rest.

It may be because of this that Sleeping Beauty frustrates. The enigmatic aura that Julia Leigh carefully nurtures is both painfully affected and needlessly obscure, squandering an intriguing scenario by lapsing into cryptic torpor. Worse, at the screening I attended, a number of moments weighted with an otherwise overbearing seriousness elicited, presumably unintended, laughter. Although not without its pleasures—the performances, particularly that of Browning, are excellent—it is difficult to be seduced by Sleeping Beauty, the film aiming to make a much greater impact than it seems capable of delivering.


First published in Realtime Arts, Iss. 103, web edition, July 12th 2011

The Black Angels, The Laurels, Joel Gion @ The Metro Theatre, Friday July 1

Following an enthusiastically deadpan set from The Laurels, the good officers of City of Sydney brought a rather friendly black tail-wagger inside The Metro to check out all the sights and smells: spilt beer, fake smoke, stale sweat. Although the sight of four policepersons stalking their way through a sea of black t-shirts could never be anything but a welcome one, as an exercise in protecting gig-goers from themselves it seemed to be remarkable ineffective – at least judging from the aromas that began to circulate as soon as the houselights went down… Maybe they were just taking shelter from the drab evening outside.

Former Brian Jonestown Massacre tambourine man Joel Gion provided the soundtrack for an enjoyable interlude of standing-around-and-waiting-for-them-to-get-on-with-it, spinning a bit of ‘60s girl-pop, a little spaghetti western, and generally mixing it up. Considering the raffish charm with which he leads his own group The Dilettantes, it was somewhat disappointing that crowd interaction stayed off the menu for this stint of DJing, Gion limiting himself to mincing gormlessly between the turntable and his box of records, with the occasional pout at the offstage sound engineer. We didn’t think it was loud enough, either.

Neither, for that matter, were The Black Angels. Although they routinely get lumped in with groups such as Wooden Shjips, Dead Meadow or The Warlocks, the Austin quintet’s take on nu-psychedelia relies almost completely on throwing down layer after layer of menacing, scuzz-riven drones, chasing a relentless purity all their own. What was lacking in volume tonight was made up for by the group’s sheer inexorability, a needless cameo from Gion the only thing interrupting an otherwise mesmerising endurance test. Though hardly made for dancing, rhythmic torso gyrations were enjoyed by many, emerging from the darkness energised, sweat-drenched and grinning.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 420, July 11th 2011