Sleeping Beauty
Dir: Julia Leigh
2011
****
For me Sleeping Beauty is a story of passiveness, power and sleep. A politic or social statement perhaps; our protagonist is a sleepwalker, she is never truly awake. She works hard at several jobs, goes to Uni and cares for her sick friend and is submissive to everyone. She lets the wealthy and powerful dominate her, exploit her and do as they will with her, quite literally, for money. She is the eternal sleepwalker, a lost soul in the sea of society. Aren't we all Sleepwalkers; working hard, selling our souls little by little, working for the man? The real tragedy is that she so longs to be rescued (the only real link to the fairytale) but no one does, she is alone. It's a great debut from directer Julia Leigh (not Mike's daughter) and another in a successful succession of Aussie films of late, an industry that has been overlooked and unappreciated for too long! Its only fault is that for all its visual beauty and excellent script you just can't help but look away during certain scenes and when a film makes you want to look away it's not doing something right, right? There are always exceptions I suppose. It had to be provocative to tell the story the way it was intended and it certainly wasn't sexy, which was also a very important thing to get right. It is cringe-worthy at times but importantly so. Destined to be misunderstood, it is quite hard to sit through at times to be fair. It really needs to be seen because it is a great film, it's not a soft-porn film either, anyone who thinks so is completely missing the point (and is a bit perverse).