Day 87 -- Sleeping Beauty

Released: December 2nd, 2011

Starring: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie
  
Writer/Director: Julia Leigh

Description: A haunting portrait of Lucy, a young university student drawn into a mysterious hidden world of unspoken desires.

[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]

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There is such a thing as a bad art house film. Just like any other genre of movie, it has poorly produced and terribly executed releases each year. What is different when it is an art house film as opposed to your standard mainstream production is that these movies are critically acclaimed for reasons that I have still yet to understand. Sometimes it appears that all you have to do is take on a taboo topic and you’ll be praised as this progressive filmmaker. But if your movie makes absolutely no sense it doesn’t matter what subject you tackle; it’s still a terrible movie.

“Sleeping Beauty” is one of the most frustrating movies that I’ve watched in a long time. At first the story seems to be easy-to-follow, but as the plot moves along, I began to lose track of what exactly was the meaning of the story. In the first 10 to 20 minutes, your lead to believe the plot is about a girl struggling to make ends meet and takes any job she can get her hands on, including being a lab rat, a copy girl in an office, and a waitress in a barista. Then about halfway through she answers an ad to be a waitress at functions for rich people. And apparently the job involves half a dozen naked women serving these people their drinks, their food and their nightly eye candy.

From the moment that Lucy (Browning) took this unique job, her character is nude for about three quarters of the remainder of the movie. While I feel there’s a place for nudity on film -- and even to some extent, gratuitous nudity -- there’s really no need for it in about half the scenes. I understand that all the scenes where she’s being a server or being the “sleeping beauty” need to have the nudity in order to tell the story, but what I don’t get is the random breast flashing and ass shots that, more or less, feel like they’re in there for shock value.

One perfect example, is when she goes back to her boyfriend’s apartment and she finds him in bed, and I assume he is dying (honestly, I couldn’t tell if he died) so she decides to take her shirt off – and only her shirt – and crawl in bed with him. The emotion in the scene was all about his death, which could’ve easily been portrayed without her taking her shirt off. I appreciate the nude female form, but at some point enough’s enough. If I want to watch boobs for 90 minutes, I’d watch Skinemax.

Needless to say after the first hour, the nudity blended into the background and I got to concentrate on the performances. Emily Browning, better known for her role in that “filmmaking masterpiece” “Sucker Punch”, was in every scene in this film and really gave an okay performance. I knew the emotion she was trying to portray, but she never made me feel as sorry for the character as I should’ve been. Now I don’t know if that was the writing or her acting skills, but there’s a very big disconnect between Lucy and the audience. If I hadn’t seen “Sucker Punch”, I would’ve erred on the side of the writing. Yet, Browning shows glimpses of being able to carry an emotional movie, maybe even becoming an indie darling, which would net her a good career. But in this film, she fails to reach the vulnerability needed for this character.

It was hard to gauge any the other actor’s performances because Browning dominated screen time, but that could also be a bad thing because supporting actors are what makes movies good. Rachel Blake, who portrays Clara (the madam of the movie?), plays the role as icy as it needs to be done but she completely falls apart in the one emotional scene she has at the end. Again, I don’t know whether it’s poor writing of the supporting characters or poor choice of actors for these roles, but not one of them had a standout performance and that’s not good news.

Speaking of direction and writing, let’s discuss the God-awful ending. Spoiler alert for anyone that actually wants to see the movie, her last job as a sleeping beauty ends with her client dying next to her. The final scene of the movie is the session recorded from the spy camera that Lucy had planted, and all it really is two people sleeping in a bed – unless I missed something. From what I can gather, and trust me I’ve thought about this way too much, her client wants to die and would like to do it next to a beautiful woman. Clara obliges, and gives him enough of the sleeping medicine to kill him, but for some reason she becomes panicked when Lucy does it awake immediately in the morning. Lucy eventually does gain consciousness, but appears to be having a reaction to the medicine, which I guess is because of the pills and alcohol she did the night before.

After all that, I still have no idea what the ending is trying to tell me. It feels like they cut the movie off right at the end of act two. There’s rising action (well kind of) and everything seems to be falling apart for our protagonist: She’s lost her boyfriend, she’s taken drugs and had sex with a coworker and her client has died in the bed next to her, but all of this is supposed to lead to some kind of ending; not be the ending. Concluding the movie the way Julia Leigh did, is both pompous and disrespectful to your audience. Even a story that kicked you in the gut as much as the “Passion of the Christ”, has some sort of redeeming ending before the credits roll. The arrogant thing to say is ‘that we all can have happily ever after’, but ending the movie when a character is about to get enlightened; is the equivalent of giving the middle finger to your paying customers. She’d of been better off killing Lucy, which she may have, but left it too ambiguous for someone to grasp on first viewing.

“Sleeping Beauty” is a movie that I don’t think he knows what it wants to be. Does it want to be a coming-of-age tale? Or does it want to be an uncomfortable, emotionally-gripping drama? Because the way this movie was made, it's nowhere close to either. The movie ends too soon to be a coming-of-age and the lack of connection with Lucy keeps it from being the latter. I think the writer had a good high-concept idea with the sleeping beauties --young girls that older men pay to do anything they want with them sans penetration -- but what she forgot was to make an actual compelling story around this idea. I honestly do not know how it got the praise it did because it is an awfully executed movie – from top to bottom.

Rating: 3/10 – This is the first movie in a long time that made me do a dismissive wanking motion as the credits ran. It really felt like a waste of my time, and I’ve watched Little Hercules. At least that movie had structure, even if was very poor structure. A film needs to have a beginning, middle and end, and that end must conclude the movie; whether it’s happily ever after or not, it still needs to finish the movie. I can see comparisons to "Inception", but that movie concluded even though it left the dream or not a dream question.