Sleeping Beauty (2011)
Endorsed by Jane Campion, novelist Julia Leigh’s directorial debut actually has more in common with Michael Haneke than the director of The Piano. Emily Browning plays Lucy, a college student who also works as a high-end escort, and it’s this line of work that leads her first into employment for a bizarre supper club and then into a more rarefied form of prostitution. Voluntarily drugged so that she will fall into a coma for the night, men are led into her bedroom by coolly maternal madam Clara (Rachael Blake), where they can do whatever they want to her. There is, however, one golden rule: no penetration. Leigh clearly isn’t interested in realism – the bedrooms and bars of her film have more in common with art house pornography than Requiem For A Dream – and Lucy’s reasons for entering this world are obscure to the end, her only interaction with the outside world a sister-like relationship with a depressive drug addict. As a study of the female body, however, it’s fascinating. As played by Browning, Lucy may be passive, but her passivity exerts a certain power over both her clients and the audience. The way in which she slides into the “sleeping beauty” gig, or calmly takes a pill offered to her by a co-worker suggest a slippery hold on the world around her, but it’s this very unknowability that keeps her tethered, as an increasing number of people try to lay claim to her, both emotionally and physically. None of the aging men that enter her bedchamber are capable of penetrating her physically (Leigh is ruthless in her clinical examination of the indignities of age on the withered male form), and, perversely, Lucy’s own attempt at turning the gaze onto one of her night-time interlopers is similarly flaccid. It’s austere film-making, and occasionally po-faced – one digression about an obscure Russian author is particularly misjudged – but curious and intelligent at the same time, spear-headed by a fearlessly ambiguous lead performance.
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