Sleeping Beauty
Time Out New York Project: Issue #839, December 1-7, 2011
★★★★☆
Dir. Julia Leigh. 2011. N/R. 104mins. Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie.
She was a satirical object of fetishization in the most recent Zack Snyder film; now, the very beautiful and brave young actor Emily Browning slugs us with another sucker punch in the disturbing debut feature from Australian novelist Julia Leigh. Browning plays Lucy, an Aussie college student up to her ears in student loans and other debts. Her odd jobs range from waitress to science-lab guinea pig to turning the occasional trick. But nothing seems to relieve the pressure, until she answers an ad for an erotic catering service run by the über-businesslike Clara (Blake), who says things like “Your vagina will not be penetrated” with a chilling lack of emotion.
At first, the new job is a lot of pouring wine for snooty upper-crusters in her skivvies. But soon, Lucy is promoted to a strangely lucrative new position: Come to Clara’s house, take a narcotizing tonic, and just sleep. But of course it’s not that simple, and what happens to Lucy when she’s under, while never approaching Salò levels of depravity, still qualifies as pretty skin-crawling. Leigh does a stellar job of showing how these events seep into the unaware girl’s everyday existence — almost all of the film’s sequences are photographed in precisely composed, inherently surreal single shots — until she is damagingly consumed by curiosity and takes steps to uncover what she’s gotten herself into. It’s the plight of many a fairy-tale heroine. But there is no happy ending in store here — just the cold, cruel light of clarity.—Keith Uhlich
