Sleeping Beauty

“You will go to sleep: you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed.” Death-haunted, quietly reckless, Lucy is a young university student who takes a job as a Sleeping Beauty. In the Sleeping Beauty Chamber, old men seek an erotic experience that requires Lucy’s absolute submission. This unsettling task starts to bleed into Lucy’s daily life and she develops an increasing need to know what happens to her when she is asleep.
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A college student (Emily Browning) turns to niche sex work in Julia Leigh’s bold take on the Sleeping Beauty fable. Cool and exacting, it’s a powerful debut from a woman better known as one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors. Leigh challenges conventions of heterosexuality just as she challenges the eroticized pursuit of young women that marks so many art films by older men.

Programmer's Note

Beautiful, precise and coolly shocking, Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty is a provocation. Not only does it confront each viewer with the perverse logic of human sexuality, it marks a direct challenge to the logic of much art cinema as well. This is a powerful debut from a woman better known as one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors (she’s represented elsewhere in the Festival by The Hunter, which was adapted from her novel).

In order to fund her studies, college student Lucy (Emily Browning, whose appearance in Sucker Punch hardly prepares viewers for this bold lead performance) begins her journey into the realm of niche sex work by waitressing fancy dinners in lingerie. But that gig proves mere foreplay to her next position, for which she slips ever deeper into more esoteric activities. Her initial interview with Clara (Rachael Blake), the proprietor of a high-end prostitution operation, finds Lucy being scrupulously fondled. This turns out to be a sign of things to come.

Embodying an imaginatively eroticized reading of the Sleeping Beauty fable, Lucy is soon administered a sleeping potion and, once unconscious, has her body surrendered to paying clients who are given free rein to indulge any desire other than actual penetration. The film develops a fascinating, eerie tension by allowing us to witness what happens to this beauty once she’s asleep — though it is only a matter of time before Lucy wants to see as well.

Sleeping Beauty shares a perspective of confrontational intelligence with Jane Campion (who lends her name to this film as “presenter”), and there are shades of Catherine Breillat here as well. But Leigh’s achievement is entirely her own. Using mesmerizing long takes and lingering silences, her aesthetic is exacting. In crafting her own Belle de Jour, she challenges conventions of heterosexuality just as she challenges the eroticized pursuit of young women that marks so many art films by older men.
Cameron Bailey

Director's Bio Julia Leigh was born in Sydney and studied law and philosophy at the University of Sydney. She is the author of the novels The Hunter and Disquiet. Sleeping Beauty (11) is her first feature film.