SLEEPING BEAUTY

An emotionless Lucy seems bored with her life. She works two dead-end jobs, one as waitress in a cheap restaurant, and the other as a mailroom office temp whose main task is to collate duplicated papers.  She also earns money by having a hose shoved down her throat for medical research.  Somehow in between all this she is a student at the University of Sydney. although she shows scant interest in the lectures she attends.

Unable to pay her rent Lucy answers an newspaper advert and gets a well paid job working for Clara a Madam, as a lingerie clad silver service waitress in a private club full of dirty old men.  Later on at a secluded country estate she is ‘promoted’ by Clara to the role of sleeping beauty in which she’s made to drink tea laced with a powerful anesthetic, lie naked on a bed in an ornate bedroom, and remain unconscious as Clara brings in a stream of sexually frustrated elderly men to have there way with her.  But as Clara reminds each one them, there is to be no penetration.

Its really not possible for me to give much more of the plot away because it would contain spellers, but also to be totally honest, so much of this extremely baffling film made no sense to me at all.  And trust me, I wasn’t the only one that greeted the closing credits sighing very loudly ‘What the feck?’

Evidently filmmaker Julia Leigh making her directing debut from her own screenplay used a great deal of subtext, which frankly many of us didn’t get at all.  There were also whole sections of story that didn’t develop into anything that related to the plot in anyway, or really make much sense:  like Lucy’s sad alcoholic friend Birdman who she visited regularly just to feed him breakfast cereal with vodka. Or the fact that on getting her first big pay packet from Clara even though she was broke, Lucy very dramatically set fire to a $100 bill, and whilst the money rolled in from her Sleeping Beauty work, she still kept on all her other low-paying menial jobs too.

I’ve been ruminating over this movie ever since I saw it earlier tonight and even with much reflection I simply cannot get a spin on the whole thing.  I know that it is a tale about a woman allowing herself to be exploited and the telling of it with, all its full frontal nudity, is neither erotic nor pornographic.

On the plus side the two main female actors are very good: young Emily Browning as Lucy, and Rachel Blake as the wonderfully uptight and far-too-perfect-to-be-true Clara.  Also there is more than tad resemblance, particularly where Lucy & Clara first meet, to Stanley Kubrick’s stunning ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.

If you are a regular reader of this Blog you will know that I usually love movies that are out there on a limb, but this one is way past that!

★★★★★★