DVD Review: Emily Browning Stars in Daring ‘Sleeping Beauty’

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CHICAGO – “Sleeping Beauty” is such a unique modern fairy tale that it will almost certainly turn off many of the viewers who choose to rent it. As the gorgeous Emily Browning looks longingly over her shoulder, half-naked from the cover of the DVD case, renters may think they’re in for an erotic thriller on a Saturday night. This is NOT an erotic thriller. It is a daring, unusual drama about fetishization with such an uncommon storytelling sense that it becomes quite a conversation starter, a film that’s hard to forget. It’s a hard movie to describe or prepare one for viewing and will almost certainly infuriate as many as it enthralls but it’s not like anything else you could see this month. It’s not even close.

DVD Rating: 3.5/5.0

Julia Leigh writes and directs a film presented by Jane Campion that becomes hypnotic in its presentation of a world of beautiful, naked people that has somehow been completely removed of its sexuality. Leigh’s film features a gorgeous female lead who is paid to be naked with powerful people and yet there is nothing sexual about it. She is often comatose and penetration is not allowed. She has become a possession, something to stare at like the legendary title character in her glass box. It’s a fascinating film and I wish that MPI/IFC had done the work a better service by offering more special features than just the trailer. Daring movie watchers should check this out.

Sleeping Beauty
Photo credit: MPI

Synopsis:
Acclaimed director Jane Campion (The Piano) presents Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, a fascinating depiction of a young woman’s reckless decent into a shocking world of erotic desires. Lucy (Emily Browning in a breakthrough performance) is a young university student whose sexual exploits are driven by whim and endured with an utter passivity. When she answers an ad in the student newspaper for a lingerie waitress, she is secretly initiated into the job of a Sleeping Beauty, for which she is sedated and given to her male clients in total sexual submission. As this unnerving experience begins to bleed into her daily life, Lucy develops the courage to break the spell and discover what happens to her while she sleeps. An official selection at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Sleeping Beauty “finds unusual detail in an outlandish scenario, operating on a daringly steady rhythm I found hypnotic.” (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune)

Special Features:
o Trailer

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com