FILM OF THE WEEK: Sleeping Beauty
by Vadim Rizov 
Australian university student Lucy (
Emily Browning) walks into a gleamingly white lab designed to visually sterilize the unpleasant biological realities under examination. A young doctor greets her, offers perfunctory thanks for agreeing to serve as a test subject, and carefully threads a tube down her throat; Lucy's gagging sounds don't evince so much as a glance of concern from a female scientist in the background. The connotations of forced fellatio in an immaculate setting serve as a shorthand summary of
Sleeping Beauty: dispassionate experiments in sexual objectification.
Taking up the titular occupation involves Lucy knocking herself out for the night with unspecified herbs under madam Clara's (
Rachael Blake) watchful eye, naked and unconscious while being manipulated in any way the male client pleases short of penetration. The sleeping beauty figure isn't a new one, spurring elderly male narrators to meditation in
Yasunari Kawabata's thrice-filmed short story "House of the Sleeping Beauties" and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez?s novella
A Memory of My Melancholy Whores; novelist Julia Leigh's task in her cinematic debut is to shift the focus from aging men to the young women they monologue and reclaim the narrative center, an admirable but less-than-visceral concern.
Leigh's groping for an oneiric mood: Lucy moves in a largely mute, would-be dream-state even when awake. Likewise, "dream logic" is a euphemistic way to describe the film's aggressively incomplete narrative, which deliberately makes it impossible to suss out key details. Her most only evident friendship is with cadaverous Birdmann (
Ewen Leslie), seen taking his cereal with a vodka base in alcoholic, agoraphobic repose. They enjoy talking in parodic flurries of politeness, sardonically repeating "very nice to see you" back and forth; occasionally he makes a sexual advance and is politely dismissed. Family is even more obscure: Lucy gets a call from her mom at one of her jobs, claims the old lady is an addict running a psychic hotline and leaves it at that.
Lucy needs money, since her various jobs don't (seem to) add up to much; is her esoteric choice of occupation fearlessness, sexual indifference, oblique thrill-seeking or the ability to vacate her head whenever necessary? Leigh's not telling, though she provides indirect hints. During one particularly baffling bonding interlude, they watch a nature documentary on TV about a marsupial mouse; this moment is described in the
script as a "long interlude of uncomplicated lifeforce"?i.e. something Lucy never manifests.
Initially, Clara places Lucy to work offering nude wine service for a group of fustian retirees looking to combine Edwardian-era table settings and after-dinner port with some mildly naughty jollies. Subsequently, Lucy agrees to serve as a sleeping booty, leading to three men who come in and offer various portraits of aberrant male sexuality. Man 1 (
Peter Carroll) comes in with Clara, thanks her for the hook-up, turns to the camera and delivers an endless monologue synopsis of Ingeborg Bachmann's story "The 30th Year" in an oppressively "literary" moment allowing a frail old man to speak with hardly any metaphorical cover about confronting mortality and worrying about broken bones. Man 2 (
Chris Haywood) comes in, unleashes a stream of vile misogynist epithets and literally leaves a mark on Lucy; the script specifies that this is to be "an excruciating scene of utter degradation," though the effect's theoretical. Man 3 (
Hugh Keays-Byrne) comes in and resists verbal articulation altogether, instead throwing Lucy around like an ineffectual circus strongman. The scenes make sense overall: one is about an old man confronting his frailness with an inverse image (a woman trapped in her own body through unconsciousness rather than age), one's about a middle-aged man confronting his decaying frame by enacting violence on women, and the third man has physical vitality to spare but no way to relate to Lucy except as literally a body.
What's absent is the kind of more-than-words spell that would take this beyond an exercise into the truly unsettling. The best moment is a smash-cut that's both the only gesture towards expressionism the entire running time and a stunningly literal metaphor: even though Lucy needs to get some sleep to sleep even
more tomorrow, she decides to pop a restaurant co-worker's random pills and party instead. Picking up a chair, she slams it onto the table she's cleaning, and the film cuts to Julia and co-worker in a lake at nighttime, popping up to the surface in step-printed slow motion. As a way of breaking up the film's climate-controlled, hermetic calm, it's a late-breaking unexpected shock with a sudden dash of
Ben Frost's sparsely used, eerie post-rock score. As a metaphor though?coming right after Lucy's taken her sole proactive step to find out what's going on while she's knocked out?it's freshman-comp-level literal: she's breaking to the surface, a whole new level of consciousness, coming up for air, etc., in a gesture not that far off from Neo's gooey arrival in the real world in
The Matrix.
David Lynch is one of the undisputed champions of translating subliminal sexual unease into phantasmic territory, which makes his fundamentally unpalatable fear of women and intercourse compelling; Leigh shoots for a much less heightened version of the same vibe, in which certain rooms seem indefinably menacing even when there's nothing overtly wrong, and she's got much more sophisticated thoughts about human sexuality. (The relationship between Lucy and nervous, fine-boned Birdmann recalls the weird charge between
Lara Flynn Boyle's Donna Hayward and Lenny Van Dohlen's agoraphobic Harold Smith on
Twin Peaks.) Theoretically (and it's all theory; this is a definite contender for least-arousing-movie-with-constant-full-frontal status), she's on solid ground, and there's something hypnotic about Leigh's perversely cool approach to the material. She has visionary weirdo ambitions, but offers up dream analysis without the dream itself.
Posted by ahillis at November 29, 2011 4:55 PM
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