Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, 2011)

[Hans M.]

I did not see a thread here for this amazing movie. I wrote a review on my blog today:

It seems to be hitting theaters and has divided critics right down the middle. I think it's a great effort and offers a lot for the adventurous film goer and maybe even those with more... baser desires to ogle Emily Browning in a brave performance in so many ways...

[domino harvey]

From the Dynamic 2011 Thread:

Emily Browning, who would have bankrupt a small nation were she paid by the nude scene, stars as the ultimate masturbatory prop in this fantasy treatment of pornography (how's that for redundancy) wherein a fetching young ciphery lass offers up her passive body for male consumption. I wrongly had the film pegged as a satire early on, an understandable mistake when presented with lines like "Match your lipstick to your labia," but alas the film has Something Important To Say. But in the words of Rodney Dangerfield, about what I have no idea. The film, like its protagonist, just sort of sits there on screen, not making much effort to do anything but remain obtuse for reasons that must have seemed profound to someone involved, but not the audience.

[Hans M.]

From the Dynamic 2011 Thread:

alas the film has Something Important To Say. But in the words of Rodney Dangerfield, about what I have no idea. The film, like its protagonist, just sort of sits there on screen, not making much effort to do anything but remain obtuse for reasons that must have seemed profound to someone involved, but not the audience.

I have to agree. It does seem to reach for something but the film wanders through a fog of obliqueness, but, my, is that obliqueness interesting to watch, and I'm not just talking about the Browning's nudity, but (also) the art direction and camera work.

[FerdinandGriffon]

From the Dynamic 2011 Thread:

alas the film has Something Important To Say. But in the words of Rodney Dangerfield, about what I have no idea. The film, like its protagonist, just sort of sits there on screen, not making much effort to do anything but remain obtuse for reasons that must have seemed profound to someone involved, but not the audience.

I have to agree. It does seem to reach for something but the film wanders through a fog of obliqueness, but, my, is that obliqueness interesting to watch, and I'm not just talking about the Browning's nudity, but (also) the art direction and camera work.

Can anyone tell me in what respect the film is oblique, opaque, or obtuse? Sure, the heavily EWS indebted style gives it a veneer of mystery, but its a very thin one. In all other respects it seemed to me much too on the nose. To my eyes, this is a very straightforward, vulgar feminist reworking of the source material, Yasunari Kawabata's novella House of the Sleeping Beauties. Leigh switches the focus of the narrative from one of the old men visiting the brothel to one of the young women, in the process chucking out everything the book has to say about time, memory, matter, desire, and death, and replacing it with a few obvious and familiar observations about the objectification of women and the dangers of male eroticism and romanticism, while contradictorily holding onto the titillation of the premise. (Almost every time I've read or heard a positive opinion of the film Browning's figure has come up in similarly glowing terms, which troubles me.)

The only sequences in the film that I found interesting or unsettling were those where Browning visits the Birdmann chracter. Here the film doesn't rely on arch, pre-prepared imagery from earlier films or the exotica of Kawabata's novel, and explores a relationship which because of its peculiarity and precise detail is much more fruitful material for Leigh. As these scenes point out, Wertherism still exists in ever more corrupt forms, and continues to burden women in debilitating ways.

There also seems to be a nascent critique of Orientalism somewhere in the film, but it's never coherent and often verges on hypocrisy.

[domino harvey]

To be clear, none of my comments are attempts to affirm the movie

[karmajuice]

I didn't view the film as merely feminist -- that was my initial reaction, given the material, but Browning's descent seems entirely willful and downright nihilistic. The film is more concerned with the interrelation of certain themes and oppositions, namely sex and death, age and youth, and the romantic allure of beauty. Some feminist commentary is implicit, given the subject matter, but I don't feel it's the focus of the film. Browning is neither cypher-like nor oblique, though she alienates us with her crass self-destruction. Leigh even manages to make her naked figure alien to us, with its staid postures and stark whiteness. We only glimpse something worthy of our sympathy when her guard drops. On the other hand, our sympathy readily goes out to her elderly visitors, who we see at their weakest.

Certainly the film is trying to say something, but you can't accuse it of being didactic because it has no discernible agenda. Its ideas are too complex and enigmatic and contradictory to reduce to some moralistic feminist message. Now, some may find its ambivalence unappealing. I have issues with the film myself. For such a carefully paced film, I feel like some of the writing is carelessly cavalier. Consequently, the conclusions one can draw from it are a little too mixed. Many of the subplots seem to be saying something, yet they only show the tip of the iceberg. But on the whole its premise captivated me, in particular her relationship to Birdman and its relation to her sleepytime suitors. I don't have a firm grasp on what the film is trying to tell me, but that's part of its appeal; it has stuck in my mind. I do know certain aspects of the film left a strong impression. Its final shot is among the most haunting I've ever seen. I absolutely do not understand it, not in any tangible way, but it lingers.

[FerdinandGriffon]

Certainly the film is trying to say something, but you can't accuse it of being didactic because it has no discernible agenda.

It has an extremely explicit agenda. For example, so many of the scenes are constructed as one shot, one idea gags, little vignettes not unlike those in Roy Andersson's later films. But where Andersson's scenes are absurd Leigh's have an all too obvious import (and aren't very funny). For example, the opening shot.

SpoilerShow

She's deep-throating the whatsit. Being exploited by the male doctor and the larger medical industry. duh. Or the scene at the Australian version of Best Buy. Yes, the boy shamelessly exploits her image, reproduced everywhere and beyond her control, and is then indifferent and rude to the flesh and blood human being he is faced with. Or any of the sleeping scenes, in each of which a single form of male insecurity is paraded and ridiculed.

Once again, I'd appreciate it if someone who appreciates it could point out a single specific moment in the film where it's oblique, opaque, obtuse, or complex. Contadictory? I'll give it that.

Also, the female characters don't have to be sympathetic for a film to be feminist. Look at Mizoguchi, Imamura, Martel, Naruse. The latter director actually adapted Kawabata far more successfully in his Sound of the Mountain, even though he too shifted the perspective away from the male protagonist, added a feminist critique, and otherwise departed from the source material just as much as Leigh has done with Sleeping Beauty. The difference is, Naruse had somewhere worthwhile to take his version of the story and the chops to do this artistically and originally, while Leigh aims only to reach a few familiar dead ends by means of shortcuts borrowed from that greatest and most well-worn of all film-school lending libraries, Stanley Kubrick.

[karmajuice]

I'll agree that its feminist perspectives don't carry much weight, nor am I arguing that the film has no feminist concerns when it clearly does. But I do feel like these concerns are peripheral or supplemental to a more central obsession with death, age, weakness, and the ways we seek solace to combat those fears.

Nor did I argue that the film is not feminist because of the unsympathetic protagonist, although the film does force us to question whether Browning is the victim of patriarchy or the agent of her own destruction. Also, male insecurity is not paraded and ridiculed; these men betray a vulnerability and desperation which casts them in a sympathetic light, and while their actions are beyond questionable, the film is not merely critical of them. Its attitude is more ambivalent, and the morbid final shot suggests that we're all in the same boat, male or female.

I can't offer an uninhibited defense of the film, because I don't love it passionately. Some aspects of it are very straightforward, and some of the writing feels too deliberately vague. I have mixed feelings about the style it employs; the clinical tone suits the subject matter and I like its restraint, but the style is derivative to a fault. I wish I could contradict david hare's cavalier dismissiveness with some equally cavalier permissiveness, but I don't coast on self-assured opinion-as-fact sound bites.

All I can say is that aspects of the film took root, those dimensions of the film which seem to me more elusive and intriguing than its feminist traits.

[FerdinandGriffon]

But I do feel like these concerns are peripheral or supplemental to a more central obsession with death, age, weakness, and the ways we seek solace to combat those fears.

In Kawabata's novel, yes. these are central themes and concerns. And to a degree they are still immanent in the premise as it survives in Leigh's adaptation. But the way that she's adapted her source material (paring away any kind of abstract, emotional or metaphysical inquiry, replacing it with didactic tableaus, and exploiting the the premise to shock and titillate) makes it clear to me that she has no interest in examining them in any depth. It's arthouse-sleaze window dressing.

I don't want to be that "the-book-is-always-better-than-the movie" guy, because that's a position that drives me into conniption fits regularly, and I don't want to hold Leigh's adaptation in any way responsible to the source material (though I do believe acknowledging her dept to the book in interviews is not quite the same as giving Kawabata an actual credit). However, I highly recommend that you take a look at House of the Sleeping Beauties, as I think you'll find the film that you seem to be looking for in the book. (It's only 90 pages!)

[karmajuice]

I've actually bookmarked its Amazon listing, so it's already a future purchase I have in mind. It sounded absolutely fascinating when I read up on it, and if what you say is accurate, it'll focus upon the parts of the film I found most engaging.

[John Cope]

Despite the fact that I am one of those he mentions inclined to dismiss this movie, Dan Sallitt's piece is about the best defense of it I've seen. Still can't quite go there with him though.

[puxzkkx]

I thought this was tremendously flawed but very interesting - Julia Leigh has some interesting things to say, but I don't think she really knows how to say it in cinematic terms without leaning on overwrought symbolism or stylistic 'borrowing': some of her worst, most florid novelistic tics come out in the often embarrassing dialogue, in that long monologue and in the Birdman sequences. But I think this is an interesting exploration of the nature of exploitation, and more specifically a treatment of the question 'does consent automatically imply agency'. I think she found a very committed participant for this experiment in Emily Browning, and she really is a 'participant' as none of the stunts she does in the film is simulated (even the medical guinea-pig scenes were real) except the 'sleep' itself and the sex. Browning is a smart actress and she impressed me here in the depth she brought to that central theme - her Lucy goes deeper and deeper into this underworld, brushing off the abuse she has to endure by saying 'I'm letting it happen, therefore I'm in a position of power'. Her attitude throughout struck me as similar to a criminal smirking in a mugshot - trying to wrest power out of a powerless situation. At the end she realises that she truly is 'powerless' in this situation and she allows herself to be vulnerable for the first time. Browning brings a curiosity and a Trickster-like characterisation to the role that make her big scene near the end all the more wrenching for me.

I think its monstrously uneven and more than a little bit self-indulgent but I do think it has Something To Say. It would be interesting to see this theme brought to, say, S+M relationships.

[mfunk9786]

I found Sleeping Beauty to be a rather great film because of it's lack of ONE BIG IDEA that a lot of folks here seem to be bemoaning. Films that are made in the guise of a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ style of putting one’s own meaning onto the work are a tightrope walk to be sure, but this is hardly impenetrable stuff. Instead of having a concise thesis, Julia Leigh weaves in and out of themes of isolation, youthful recklessness, self respect, mourning the loss of one’s sexuality, and discovering one’s own mortality – and that’s just scratching the surface of what’s delivered so carefully and calmly in this Benadryl-haze of a feature. Getting the most obvious thing out of the way here – the fact that Leigh wrote this film without an expectation of directing it is shocking, because she displays a visual flair that is something truly special – long shots without cutting away, finding a unique place to put the camera seemingly every time. She’s a director whose second film I’m already figuratively in line for.

Emily Browning is great here, like many college-aged women, she is seemingly always on the move – bouncing from job to job to visit to class to chores to encounter – her character, Lucy, wears an eye mask when she goes to bed, seemingly to just stop her mind from running. The audience is never let in on why exactly Lucy needs as much money as she is seemingly getting (by my count she is getting paid for four different ‘jobs’ before the one the film is notorious for even comes into the picture, unless you don’t consider her encounters in bars to be for-pay [which I contend that they are, despite the fact that money is never seen changing hands]) but we’re given tough hints here and there. Her visits to her friend Birdmann, who is unwell and seemingly aware that he is at the end of his rope with severe alcohol addiction, are the only times we see Lucy let her guard down, but the film doesn’t let us in on exactly what is going on between them, or what has gone on – they sort of speak in their own secret language, both verbally and otherwise: Leigh doesn’t feel we need to know the hows and whys of their occasional cohabitation to understand what we need to understand – that Lucy’s only source of intimacy and breezy friendship is about to go away, and she is about to need to face her life head-on without any outlet for her emotions.

The film’s central conceit is one that is a bit misunderstood in my estimation: I don’t consider what the men do to be a perverse act that’s being paid for – their perversions and reservations and sexual difficulties already exist within them, and they’re just making their last grab at youthfully expressing those very real feelings even though they aren’t necessarily able to follow through on them anymore. Now, there’s obviously some pretty menacing occurrences during these encounters, but they’re in the guise of those characters’ specific perversions – these men aren’t involving themselves in this because the idea of a young woman sleeping naked next to them is their fetish of choice, but rather because they could never have a sincere run-in with youth again (whether it calm and brimming with admiration, or menacing and hostile) if that youth were awake, regardless of how well they were paid to put on a good show for them. These men are paying for this for the same reason that many men watch legal pornography that is otherwise geared around the actresses being ‘teenagers’ – the body gets older but the brain does not, and the sexual vitality of youth becomes a flame that is not so easy to snuff out in some men’s imagination and desire. The men engaged in these dinner parties; and later, in these bedtime encounters; are old, boring, and sad – they’ve got a lot of money and have reached a point in their life when truffle-stuffed quail and caviar served by nude women is just something that they can make happen – their misery isn’t any secret to the viewer despite being surrounded by such decadence. The most intriguing moment in the film in my estimation is when a bit of Salo-level nastiness creeps in during a drink service early on in Lucy’s experience with this job – as far as I can tell, Leigh wants to communicate to us the inherent menace in the fact that Lucy has signed herself away to something that she can’t necessarily escape from if she wanted to. She’s become an object for these men to do with what they want, except for one golden rule. It makes one wonder why that golden rule is so golden, considering how much worse it could get for, say, a high-priced call girl – they could have this job, after all – making their profession of choice seem breezy in comparison. The men in the film have to resign themselves to imminent death, and Lucy has to learn how that helpless inevitability feels in a very thorny, round-about way. To me – that’s about as close as Sleeping Beauty comes to having ONE BIG IDEA – the tragedy of youth’s discovery of the inexorableness of their own demise.