Precisely staged but annoying blunt, “Sleeping Beauty” is an artful exercise in pointlessness.
Novelist Julia Leigh Australia’s first feature as writer and Director has acknowledged a voyeuristic allure. Lucy (“Sucker Punch” Star Emily Browning), a college student, pure, porcelain beauty, engaged in a series of increasingly bizarre, odd jobs to pay the Bills before being dressed in clothes of wine-the server at an elite dinner and, finally, plaything for unconscious old man rich.
Yes, You read that right. Lucy answered an ad in the newspaper of the University and Clara (Rachael Blake), a conservative, older woman who hired him to this creepy, private soirees, finds Lucy so beautifully, she figures is empty it will be the ideal candidate to serve as a “sleeping beauty” for her clients. All he had to do was take a drug that sedates him, climbed naked into the bed and let these people do as they want with him-though as Clara guarantee him, there will be no penetration. Lucy said: “You’ll go to bed. You will wake up. This would be as if they were hours there never was. “
Leigh described the descendants of these real matter-of-factly, through convincing, the length of required whereby the camera quite often just hold still and take in the trappings of this world is rare curly. In that regard, it is very similar to this week’s “shame,” the sex addict’s spiral is presented in an aesthetic mode mesmerizingly cold. But Michael Fassbender character undergoes evolution-or rather the devolution–and he’s like a very good actor that he found the power and subtlety in this figure is problematic.
Browning, meanwhile, revealed nothing–when he wakes, he is so passive that he too might fall asleep–even when the character of snorting coke with a strange woman in the bath club night or coin toss determines which enables the random middle-aged man, he would sleep with that night. This is just a distraction that led to nothing, and in retrospect it looks as if they were aiming to surprise us by shock.