Sleeping Beauty – review

The first film by Australian novelist Julia Leigh, Sleeping Beauty is a curiosity, a combination of Krafft-Ebing, Charles Perrault, the brothers Grimm and some sexual fantasies out of magazines such as Forum and Erotica. It centres on Lucy (Emily Browning), a rather blank Australian student who's paying her way through college as a clerk in an office, a waitress in a cafe and a sex-worker. The most lucrative activity involves being drugged into a coma by a creepy 40-something matron in order to sleep with rich elderly men who are told they can do almost anything (including touching her neck with a burning cigarette) except penetrate her body. The dialogue is mostly laughable and delivered in the stilted manner of up-market softcore porn of the Emmanuelle and The Story of O variety, but it's far from erotic. The name of Jane Campion does not appear in the credits, but Julia Leigh speaks of her key role as "mentor" at every stage of the production, and Campion calls the film "a fascinating portrait of how some of us live or sometimes have lived…heartbreaking, tender, terrifying. I love it."