Sleeping Beauty
With Jane Campion and this other lady whose name I have forgotten, Australia seems to be producing a lot of high-profile female directors. Julie Leigh is not exactly one, but style-wise her movie certainly tries to be.
I am not sure what to make of the film. More than anything, I thought the movie was strangely vanilla. While the premise is great and almost reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto’s settings, the movie practically lacks both death and sex. Banana Yoshimoto’s stories at least were never about how men mistreat women or look down on them, although gender was always an issue, namely with respect to gender identity. This movie has this extremely subtle feminism to it – the way they touch her, the shameless Salò copy in which somebody makes the main character trip and fall on all fours, and of course the guy who screams “whore!” into her sleeping face. Back in the day, when I read Banana Yoshimoto’s books, I strongly believed I was running into emotional disaster because I was young and hopelessly in love, not because I was a woman. I was fascinated with men (and humans in general), but – never having actually been abused by a man – I was never that interested in how women are sexually dominated by men until I realized how often it happens to others.
Enough ranting: Bottom line is, the movie feels otherworldly, sometimes I even feel like the main character has never actually talked to a man. The premise of the film is so, so awesome and it’s unfortunate to see it ruined by this rather weak storyline. The film failed at showing me anything interesting, except for one scene: I liked the moment when Claire, the madame, showed genuine interest in the well-being of her girl (in real life, I assume that’s a very unlikely thing to happen), which was very different from Salò. Apart from that, I remember the somewhat Sofia-Coppola-like clothing design which I thought was pretty lovely but rather unsexy, almost frigid.
One more detail: One of the men describes the storyline of “Das dreißigste Jahr” by Ingeborg Bachmann. This is a little ironic, because I have a backstory with it. Back when I just turned 15, there was this school event which our biology teacher organized, a trip to somewhere in France. Anyways, during that trip I sat next to this guy who was one class level higher and read “Das dreißigste Jahr” out loud to me. I completely forgot the story by now, but only remembered the character Moll. It was through him that I realized it must have been the same story. At any rate, listening to the charaterization of Moll, I thought that Ingeborg Bachmann’s writing style was very male. She details things about this man which, well, normally only men would realize. With that in mind, I think the gender identities in “Sleeping Beauty” are even more screwed up.
If the mere looks of a nicely shaped girl arouse you even though the paleness makes her look like a corpse, then “Sleeping Beauty” might be the right thing for you. Otherwise you’d probably be bored, and you might be even more bored than I was, because I am a sucker for these kinds of pastel-colored, stylish prostitution films.