Saturday, October 6, 2012

Sleeping Beauty (2011)


Sleeping Beauty (2011)
101 min

Country: Australia
Language: English


Director: Julia Leigh
Writer: Julia Leigh (screenplay)
Stars: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake and Ewen Leslie


Sleeping Beauty is a 2011 Australian erotic drama film that was written and directed by Julia Leigh. It is her debut as a director. The film stars Emily Browning as a young university student who begins doing erotic freelance work in which she is required to sleep in bed alongside paying customers. The film is based in part on the novel The House of the Sleeping Beauties by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata.
The film premiered in May at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival as the first Competition entry to be screened. It was the first Australian film In Competition at Cannes since Moulin Rouge (dir Baz Luhrmann 2001). Sleeping Beauty was released in Australia on 23 June 2011. It premiered in US cinemas on 2 December 2011 on limited release. Critical reaction to the film was mixed.(Wikipedia Page)

In a review from the festival, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called the film "Technically elegant with vehemence and control . . Emily Browning gives a fierce and powerful performance . . There is force and originality in Leigh's work".David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called it "soporific in every sense", with the reservation: "Cannes audiences tend to be more forgiving in sections geared to emerging talent, like Un Certain Regard or Directors' Fortnight. Outside the glare of Competition, even this pretentious exercise might have earned some appreciation for its rigorously cold aesthetic".Ian Buckwalter of NPR noted the film's "sexless and sterile" approach to its erotic material, saying, "This Sleeping Beauty is no fairy tale; it's stark, dispassionate and noticeably short on happily ever afters.

Read Review: Hollywoodreporter.com

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