Sleeping Beauty - DVD

Film: How expensive education can be, the young student Lucy (Emily Browning) must find out every day again. With several jobs she tries to keep her head above water financially. She doesn't seem to care whether she cleans in a café, volunteers as a test subject for medical purposes, does monotonous office work or sells her body to men. But then Lucy finds an ad in a student newspaper that will change her life: an elite escort service is looking for young women who agree to let older gentlemen live out their sexual fantasies on them. The only condition: No sexual intercourse is allowed. To preserve the anonymity of the clients, the women are drugged the entire time. For Lucy an easy way to get quick money. But can she really care in the long run about not knowing what is being done to her during the artificial deep sleep?

Sleeping Beauty is the directorial debut of Australian writer Julia Leigh. The story is provocative, the production thoroughly engaging and rousing in its own special way. Still, the drama suffers from some weaknesses that ultimately stand in the way of a positive overall impression. But first the positive aspects of the film: first and foremost there is the acting performance of Emily Browning, who plays an emotionally inadequate character, but gives a lot of herself away. This doesn't mean the numerous moments in which the young actress shows herself completely naked. Rather, it's the long takes that rest on her face, which on the one hand seems strangely impassive, but on closer inspection allows the viewer a glimpse into Lucy's soul.

The long takes are another aspect of the film that can be considered quite positive. True, they are at times excruciatingly long and you have to engage with them to even begin to enjoy the film. But because Leigh practically forces the viewer to look closely, even though you would rather avert your eyes at times, the actually very calm events gain an enormous intensity, which is hard to resist. The somehow sterile-looking décor, despite the very warm colours, and the almost emotionless look at Lucy's everyday working life, in which no great distinction is made between wiping tables in a café and serving drinks at extravagant old men's dinners with almost no clothes on, or performing sexual acts in a drugged state, create an extremely oppressive underlying mood that lasts even after the somewhat confusing finale.

The biggest problem Sleeping Beauty has to contend with is admittedly not its provocative and rather ethically repugnant content. Rather, it's the fact that Leigh seems to focus too much on her imagery and thus loses sight of the character drawing. As such, it never really becomes clear why Lucy gets involved with the unusual and degrading job in the first place, why she goes about her daily life almost apathetically, and what she takes on the burden of multiple jobs for. The character, like many elements of the story, remains a mystery and so the viewer finds it difficult to form an emotional attachment with which some interest in the character's fate would also come.

Sure, the film is well worth watching as challenging arthouse cinema and is especially recommended to viewers who enjoy more unwieldy films with difficult, controversial themes. But in view of the really good acting performance of Emily Browning and due to the physical as well as mental nudity she has to display here, paired with some very strong images, in the end the feeling remains that Julia Leigh has given away a lot of potential here after all.

Picture + Sound: In terms of the picture, the colour scheme, which is dominated by earthy brown tones, is particularly striking, and despite a great deal of warmth, also exudes a certain sterility. Otherwise, the visual realization convinces with a good overall sharpness and coherent contrasts. The sound remains largely restrained, with numerous moments of oppressive silence. Since this is an important contribution to the atmosphere of the film, there is therefore also despite the rather unspectacular implementation an absolutely satisfied: good!

Extras: In addition to the trailer for the film and some program tips, the DVD has just under 13 minutes of interviews with the director, the lead actress and other crew members to offer. While the interviews don't really go into depth, they are definitely helpful and recommended as supplemental explanations after watching the film!

Conclusion: Sleeping Beauty is a very unwieldy, but in its way extremely intense drama, which almost forces the viewer to watch with its long takes, even if what is shown is not always pleasant and hard to bear. Unfortunately, for all the power of the imagery, director Julia Leigh loses sight of the fleshing out of her characters a bit, which coupled with the somewhat odd finale leads to a somewhat unwieldy overall impression. But if you are interested in provocative and unusual arthouse cinema, you can safely take a look at this technically well-made DVD, if only because of the courageous as well as depressingly good performance by lead actress Emily Browning

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp