Precisely staged but maddeningly obtuse, “Sleeping Beauty” is an artful exercise in pointlessness.
Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s first feature as writer and director has an admittedly voyeuristic allure. Lucy (“Sucker Punch” star Emily Browning), a college student of pristine, porcelain beauty, engages in a series of increasingly odd, odd jobs to pay the bills before becoming a lingerie-clad wine-server at elite dinners and, eventually, an unconscious plaything for wealthy old men.
Clara (Rachael Blake), the conservative, older woman who hires her for these creepy, private soirees, finds Lucy so blankly lovely, she figures she’d be the ideal candidate to serve as a “sleeping beauty” for her clients. All she has to do is take a drug that sedates her, climb naked into bed and let these men do as they wish with her — although as Clara assures her, there will be no penetration. Lucy is told: “You will go to sleep. You will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed.”
Leigh depicts this surreal descent matter-of-factly, through assured, long takes in which the camera quite often just holds still and takes in the kinky trappings of this rarefied world. In that regard, it’s similar to “Shame.” But Michael Fassbender’s character undergoes an evolution. Browning reveals nothing — when she’s awake, she’s so passive that she may as well be asleep.
And that makes you wonder what Leigh was trying to say here. She’s fetishizing the notion of a gorgeous, young woman as a living doll, someone whose naked body is meant to be manipulated and discarded.
If she’s suggesting that Lucy derives power from this arrangement because she’s getting paid, that also ends up being a jumbled notion because at one point, Lucy unceremoniously burns some of her newly earned cash.
It’s all too empty to achieve the disturbing effect it seeks.
Unrated. 1 hour, 44 minutes. At the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax.
