Sleeping Beauty (2011)

Directed by: Julia Leigh

Student Lucy (Emily Browning) supports herself with a series of regular and ad-hoc jobs.  Some (endless photocopying, cleaning tables in a café) use her manual labour – others (serving as a medical experimentee, opportunistic prostitution) use her body and/or looks.  Her relationships with other people, flatmates, former lovers, and most notably with a reclusive alcoholic whom she both supports and aids on his path to self-destructive, are highly enigmatic.

One day she answers a newspaper advertisement, and soon she is being interviewed and prepared for what is described as a silver-service job – a description that manages to be both accurate and disingenuous at the same time.  Renamed as Sarah, she is required to serve and to sleep (drugged) while wealthy men lie with her.

Leigh takes apart the Sleeping Beauty myth and reconstructs it in terms of feminism, exploitation and the gaze.  It makes for uncomfortable viewing since we are clearly complicit, in our observation of Lucy, in the voyeuristic assault that she endures.  Her clients are limited to touching and looking but prevented from literal penetration of her.  The movie has been likened to Belle de Jour, but it’s another Buñel movie, That Obscure Object of Desire, that comes to mind.  Lucy’s beauty becomes almost an abstracted entity, something that none of the men she serves can engage with, however much they desire it.  Even Lucy cannot access it as a part of herself, as the final scene emphasises – she is forced to hide a tiny video camera in the room to provide some kind of record of what has happened to her.

The formal beauty of the movie and its principal character mean there’s a risk of the movie trying to have its cake and eat it, and there’s also perhaps a surfeit of symbolism: semioticians will have a field day.  But it is, overall, impressive and stimulating.