Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty-Your Mind Will Be Penetrated

Written and directed by Julia Leigh

Starring Emily Bronte, Rachael Blake and Michael Dorman

Novelist Julia Leigh writes and directs her debut film offering Sleeping Beauty and it is a slow burning, panties down, smoker of a flick. It is being touted as an erotic drama, which I neglected to note before agreeing to review the film and inviting my sister along to the preview screening, but I think the genre would be more existentialist nightmare, mixed with a finely tuned zeroing in on the hostility and hatred of money and all the diabolical expressions the monster of the great machine creates. Alabaster beauty Emily Bronte (the Australian actor not the English novelist) puts in a very brave, near pornographic performance that her father would no doubt be uncomfortable watching, as the shy, gorgeous, yet unassuming university student who trades her somewhat lacklustre life, in for the hard cash currency that can be earned by turning her remarkable, Anglo Saxon goddess inspired body, over to the tongues and tastes of the filthy rich and morally suspect.

The opening scene is a spooky affair to say the least. At first I thought I was in for another Australian horror show of a film with flashes of Siam Sunset (1999) creeping in, but very soon we are drawn into the screen as we watch Lucy (Bronte) struggle with her first tryst of selling her body, by giving up her throat for research into endotracheal intubation. It is an unsettling and somewhat magnetic opening to the film as the viewer finds themselves completely transfixed as they watch one foot of rubber tubing and a small balloon disappear down Lucy’s gullet. The gagging almost puts off the admiration owed to Bronte’s jaw bone which cuts a searing line across the big screen.

We follow Lucy as she meanders through a mainly dialogue-less urban Australian environment, which being non-descript in location, could be Perth as easily as it is Melbourne or Sydney. She is a lonely soul without many friends and only an absent alcoholic mother who wants her money rather than her time. She moseys into a third casual job as a lingerie silver service waiter, serving champagne and soft shell crab cakes to lawyers, judges and other high paying delusional perverts. Things take a sour turn, as they often seem to do in the world of sexual exploitation, and Lucy finds herself giving her body away in a most unusual, yet almost perfectly logical fashion, as she meets the needs of both her despairing clients as well as her ever perfunctory landlords.
 

The film is made brilliantly. It is an art house affair with a tasteful Australian flavor which is honestly mostly absent from our homegrown cinema. It will be slow for some and uncomfortable for others but there is no denying it has a resonance and power which is rarely seen in films made by Australian hands. The film has been described by some as soporific, which for those of us who have to look up such words, means sleep inducing. The irony that the film is called Sleeping Beauty surely gives even the doziest critic some quiet comfort as they drive home alone dealing with whatever the film awakened in them. Don’t bring your mother or sister, but perverted lawyers will no doubt enjoy this bizarre and engrossing titty, I mean ditty.