Review of Sleeping Beauty (2011) by Mike M — 27 Oct 2011

Adheres to a mise-en-scene of country houses, silver service and Amazonian supporting waitresses; even the crotchless panties look pricey, for once. To some extent, this obscures what the film actually has to say: I wasn't ever sure whether Leigh's target was the grinding relentlessness of male desire, or an idea of female beauty as something fluid (Lucy changes her name twice in the course of the film), unobtainable, and finally deadly.

If we take what unfolds as literal and not metaphorical, then the film would appear to be pro-prostitution, claiming that if you have a body to die for, you may as well whore it out for all it's worth (easy to imagine some dubious style mag conceiving of a fashion shoot replicating the film's look); yet it also reads as anti-sex, regarding coupling as a menial task, as beneath Lucy as her wiping down of the grout in her grotty student bathroom.

.. Two elements save the film from haziness and pomposity. The first is Leigh's compositional sense, which is self-aware and amused enough to deposit a filthy mattress in the alleyway the first time Lucy emerges from her house as an elegant lady of the night; throughout, there's a compelling disjunction between the boldness of the image and the vagueness of the ideas underpinning it - as though the whole film were being dreamt before our eyes (but whose reverie or nightmare is this, then?) The other is Browning, a rare former child star ("Lemony Snicket") for whom the words "I want to do more grown-up work" clearly mean something, who gives the generally passive - indeed, oft-catatonic - Lucy occasional, and welcome, flickers of spirit and inner life.

Unlike the pale and fragile babydolls Breillat was fond of torturing, this is a girl who appears to exist at least some of the time in the real world: Browning does a credible dawn-hour walk of shame, and if the film could be reduced to a single image illustrative of its tone, it would be the embarrassed semi-smirk she gives as one of her fellow hostesses checks to ensure Lucy's lipstick has been exactly coordinated to match the colour of her labia.

The hang-up the film has on such details suggests Leigh, like Lucy, is catering to an especially pedantic form of pervert, but in truth "Sleeping Beauty" is so perverse, so singular (and quite possibly so muddled) in what it does that it's impossible really to discern whether it's a failure or a success at this proximity, or after a first viewing: I was struck by it on some aesthetic level, but I wondered whether Leigh could or should have done more to challenge my gaze.

As it is, the film is a gorgeously blank work, a hyper-accessorised question mark.