Short Take: It assumes its shock value will hide how pretentious and hollow it truly is

Director: Julia Leigh

Screenwriter: Julia Leigh

Cast: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie

Length: 1h 44m

Synopsis: Lucy (Browning) is a 20-something college student trying to scrape by with what little money she’s able to work for. She waitresses, prints copy at a local office, and offers herself to the school labs for the occasional lab-rat-like testing. When she’s not working, we find her courting middle-aged men in swanky bars, showing off an appetite for the erotic. When she answers an ad for an unorthodox waitressing job, posted by a mysterious but obviously wealthy woman named Clara (Blake), she’s told that the job involves being scantily clad but absolutely no sex. Lucy tests out this well-paying, if not unusual gig only to find herself with an even higher paying and more unusual offer. This time she’s propositioned by Clara to come to a secluded mansion to simply take a sleeping potion, where she’ll wake up after a few hours and be driven straight home. What Lucy doesn’t know is that when she’s fast asleep Clara sells time with her unconscious body to elderly gentlemen callers, who proceed to have their way with her. By the end, Lucy is forced to question her willingness to do almost anything for money.

Analysis: Many movie critics often discern the difference between “smart” films and “dumb” films by claiming – in so many words – that the former trust that their audiences are able to follow plots and understand characterizations that develop primarily (and sometimes non-linearly) through implication and suggestion, while the latter chronicle plots that are constructed in a way that leave little (if any) room for interpretation and incorporate stereotypical characters. In other words, smart films are for attentive and participatory audiences and dumb films are for audiences that want to “turn their brains off.” Such distinctions are by all rights superficial themselves, and Sleeping Beauty is evidence of that. Much about the film is conveyed through implication, despite the fact that at several points its images can definitely be considered explicit, and Lucy can hardly be considered a stereotype. Because of these things it can be argued that director Julia Leigh demands that her audience be actively involved in the viewing experience. This combination of smart movie requisites falls flat, however, proving that such a mixture of supposedly essential ingredients is in fact a bunch of hogwash. The reason why it fails here is because it fails to do what each truly smart movie is capable of: convincing us that it has a purpose. This is the real requisite.

Over the course of the story we learn quite a bit about Lucy – or rather, we’re meant to think we do. We see her taking drugs, offering herself to strange men, and agreeing to salacious job offerings, but we never understand what motivates her to do these things. We can speculate all we want, but no hard clues about this mystery are given. We can connect certain dots if we wish, but doing so would not be due to any specific encouragement. Our failure to fully understand her motivations is from insufficient elaboration, and without it we’re not given proper guidance on how to interpret her actions or reactions. Small pieces of information about her past are given on rare occasion, but none do much to reveal what goes on inside her head. That the narrative not only involves Lucy but in effect is Lucy means that because her character remains unsupported the same can then also be said about the story as a whole. As it is, there is a difference between making conclusions and making conjectures. With Lucy failing to be properly characterized, both she and the story become positively abstract. And while what is abstract can certainly have purpose, it does almost nothing to actively argue for the existence of it. Lucy, it would seem, was created to be some sort of bearer of meaning, but not creator of it.

There are attempts to create layers within the narrative, but with no foundation such attempts are in vain

*Spoiler Alert*

If we consider what we learn about what goes on around Lucy instead of what she thinks of, we’re still left with very little to work with. Her various contexts vaguely imply certain things about her, but no headway towards discovering a purpose for the film is gained. Case in point, Lucy proves early on to be a very sexually charged girl — not a nympho mind you, but willing to take advantage of her power over men. Because we know this about her we are surprised to find out a little later on that she has a relationship with a man that appears to have no physical prospects. Their bond seems to be based on something beyond sex, which is why we are not surprised when we see her cry when caught in his embrace after he took an inordinate amount of sleeping pills. We know nothing about how the relationship formed, how long it had been going on, or exactly why sex was off the table, so the true significance of Lucy’s tears is lost on us. Near the end of the film, one of Clara’s more elderly gentleman customers pays for the opportunity to also take too much of a sleeping agent and pass away peacefully while lying next to her. And like when she lied with her platonic acquaintance until he died, Lucy wakes up in hysterics to find she unknowingly did the same with a complete stranger. The experience is understandably traumatic for her, but because we know so little about Lucy this is the only thing we understand about the situation. It isn’t an inherently bad thing to have to struggle to think beyond the obvious, but we’re afforded no help to succeed in doing so. If anything, the two related deaths give us the means to think beyond only Lucy and, for instance, re-interpret the film’s title. (The beauty of everlasting sleep?). Doing this takes some of its relation away from the main character, but that’s not a problem if the purpose of the story lies above and beyond her. The real problem, however, is that the purpose is either seriously elusive or simply non-existent. In this regard, Sleeping Beauty is a frustratingly dumb movie.

Rating: 5.0