ScreenWize

What a complex beast this beauty is. Australian novelist Julia Leigh has drawn on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores to make her feature film debut with this self-penned tale that has little in common with the Grimm fairy tale, much more in common with films like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut or perhaps Jane Campion’s In the Cut. Campion even lends her name to the film, with a ‘Jane Campion presents’. That, buzz from the film’s recent Cannes Film festival screening, and the promise of a lot of naked flesh, promise a healthy audience interest and box office for this unusual Australian film.

Emily Browning stars as Lucy, a university student working an endless parade of banal and demeaning jobs in order to pay the rent. She waits tables, she photocopies, she enlists herself for medical experiments. It’s only a small jump for Lucy from there to work as an exotic waitress, serving haute cuisine in the altogether for a fetishist society. Her beauty brings her to the attention of a Madam, Clara (Rachel Blake), who asks Lucy to join her stable of ‘sleeping beauties’. Lucy is sedated and sleeps while clients pay to do what they will with her sleeping form (though Clara promises her there will be no penetration). Lucy, however, cannot fight her interest to know what goes on while she sleeps.

Emily Browning makes the transition to grown-up cinema in a bravura performance. She is a gorgeous porcelain doll, physically very much suited to the role and with interesting parallels to her recent character in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, who also existed in a dream state. If it is a little hard to read her performance at times, it is because the character is something of a somnambulist, caring little about herself or those around her. Her motivation is hinted at though not fully explored. Some of the smaller roles are interesting, like local boy Henry Nixon as Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, or Ewen Leslie as Birdman, Lucy’s ill-fated pseudo-boyfriend. As the clients, we get brave and uncompromisingly creepy performances from Chris Haywood and Peter Carroll. But it is the film’s other female characters that prove tantalising, even if the promise of these interactions is left unsated.

Geoffrey Simpson’s cinematography and Annie Beauchamp’s art design are on the beige side of beautiful. While occasionally as lethargic as its main character, Sleeping Beauty is anything but a yawn.

CK

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon