Posts Tagged ‘Sleeping Beauty’

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.

Read the rest of this entry »