Sleeping Beauty (2011)

Lucy is a student working on a number of jobs. She’s a waitress, she works in an office and she’s involved with a science experiment at her university too. She’s not co-operating with her housemates though and the rent is overdue. When she sees an ad in the paper she applies for it. She’s driven to a manor house where she meets Clara. Clara describes the job, which involves Lucy being sedated in a bed and allowing men to watch her sleep. Lucy is assured that she will not be penetrated. Her first task with several other women is to serve a group of old men dinner at the manor house. After this she is put in a deep sleep and studied individually by three different men. Outside her job, one of Lucy’s few relationships is with an old friend of hers called Birdmann, a recovering alcoholic.

Sleeping Beauty, the directional debut of Julia Leigh, is a film strictly for those seeking a more challenging and ambiguous brand of cinema. Its minimalism and utter restraint works mostly for rather than against its purpose. The film is richly successful in creating a world that’s entirely consuming and isolating for its protagonist. Leigh relies on desaturation, like white colour palettes, to visualise this alienation. The majority of the film is also elegantly photographed at a distance using a wide angle shot to represent the isolation as Lucy becomes an individual, overwhelmed by her surroundings. Save for a misplaced phone box, it was pleasing to see a familiar location, with numerous scenes being shot at the University of Sydney. Leigh has an equally skillful understanding of the power of silence too.

Music is almost nonexistent and the dialogue is sparing so we rely entirely on our vision here; making the film compelling and tense for its entirety. And it’s extremely leisurely paced too, holding scenes for a very long time, with particular still framing, from a near-invisible camera. These formal aspects work to produce a dream-like state of slow, concentrated and delicate movements. As each scene fades to black, like the shutting of an eyelid, it becomes increasingly apparent that Lucy is almost sleeping walking through her life, with no prince to wake her up.