Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, 2011) Cannes 2011; Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie, Peter Carroll, Chris Haywood, Hugh Keays-Byrne; Browning is prostitute, inter alia, who literally sleeps with clients; Cannes
Julia Leigh is a novelist: she wrote the book on which The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011) was based.
So I've seen Julia Leigh's only film. Walt Disney it's not.
Never did like that Chris Haywood. Now I'm sure I know why.
Michael Nordine:
Films of its ilk—quiet, stylized, leaden, detached—often count a growing sense of unease among their driving forces as a substitute for more conventional, narrative-driven momentum, but Sleeping Beauty is something of an exception in that it relies on neither. Too dark to be considered wonderment yet hardly mean-spirited enough to qualify as sadistic, the primary mood cultivated here is one of bemused curiosity. Slant.
David Rooney:
... while this psychosexual twaddle will no doubt have its admirers, it seems a long shot to attract a significant following or herald the arrival of a director to watch. ... An anti-erotic fairytale, the film is a ponderous muddle of literary and cinematic allusions. ... Leigh’s cryptic clues are stubbornly and self-consciously elusive, leaving the character’s potential complexity untapped. Visually, too, the film remains uninvolving, its glacial pacing further slowed by exceedingly sparing camera movement, resulting in a look that’s neither sensual nor unsettling. The Hollywood Reporter.
Andrew Urban:
For me the film works as a fascinating idea, on just one level: the scenario and its deep resonances with the human condition. I buy it as a poetic essay about our strangeness, but it's a bit flimsy and stark in a way that lessens the idea. This is intentional, surely, because Leigh hardly allows any music to underscore the action. Andrew L. Urban, Urban Cinefile.
Garry Gillard | New: 22 October, 2012 | Now: 1 May, 2022