Sleeping Beauty
This certainly is not the "Sleeping Beauty" you know from childhood and be glad for that.
The title character of this debut by Australian Julia Leigh is a provocative, confident college student slaving away wiping the tables at a bar and sorting the faxes in an office to pay her way. She goes through the required motions mechanically; at the bar, a friendly/flirtatious coworker provides an iota of intrigue, and at the office an imperious supervisor lends some tension.
Yet, Lucy seems mostly impervious to them, yielding only on her own terms (in one scene, she refuses to apologize or offer an explanation to the supervisor for being late when given the chance and thanks her when she is fired in the following moment). By the time she passively dismisses the tedium of the office, she is firmly involved in a clandestine realm that requires the utmost passivity.
The dramatic change in Lucy’s relationship to labor begins when she answers an ad for a model from a campus pay phone. Her beauty, composure, and willingness to bear examination get her through the stiff interview, and she enters a very formal and exclusive realm where beautiful girls serve and entertain wealthy businessmen at dinner parties that are as salacious as they are exquisite.
However, her new employment will take her to a place she never imagined: a complete surrender of sexual agency. Upon arrival at the headmistress’s mansion, she drinks a tea containing a drug that will put her under for the night, one she will spend with an aged gentleman in a private room. He pays to have his way with her for the night. The only rule is that there is to be no penetration.
Her initiation is gradual, and the script builds the viewer’s anticipation with hints of a mysterious and sinister force at work. It’s in the formality, secrecy, protocol, and the cautious compassion of the headmistress.
Lucy can make $250/ hour, so it’s no surprise that she wants to take this work further. Also, we already know her to be sexually forward and uninhibited. In an early scene, she lets two thirtysomething strangers in a bar flip a coin to decide who gets to fuck her; she complies with their desire but on her own terms. She’s unflinching.
The entire process is quite ceremonious and foreboding - an interesting counterpoint to the rest of Lucy’s life, which also contains its peculiarities, though mostly it is the chaos-tinged existence of a typical student. The film’s detached narrative approach reflects its protagonist’s apparent detachment. Actress Emily Browning does a fine job of creating a character that exudes inscrutability. One should seek clarity in neither character nor narrative, even though the plot, if summarized, sounds simple enough. Lucy seems mildly invested in what happens around her (the mysterious ailment of a friend, roommate strife), but ultimately she carries an air of impassivity until...
Each encounter with a client becomes more disturbing. The first is a grey-bearded gentleman who seems to wish only for a wistful cuddle- a fabricated intimacy for nostalgia’s sake, perhaps. In a memorably odd moment, he provides the headmistress a long-winded, literary explanation of how he has come to be in that room, at the end of which she simply informs him that there is no shame there; no one is watching.
The two men who follow are less humble and gentle by far, their approaches to the motionless pale body of their purchase suggesting ominous psychosexual issues. But the scenes of these encounters are truncated. This is not a film in which titillation or morbidity are central. The wretchedness that these men bring is important to the feel, and ultimately this is a film in which off-kilter emotional responses and cold methodology creative a pervasive mood that will leave a much more indelible impression than any narrative idea, suggestion, or substance.
