Sleeping Beauty

Billed as an erotic drama and far removed from the fairytail which bares the same name, 2011s Sleeping Beauty is more like a confusing first draft of an interesting if not a little seedy idea. Emily Browning plays college student Lucy who in search of extra cash is drawn into the sordid world of erotic entertainment. At first she is required to act as a lingerie clad, silver service waitress but as things progress they take a more squalid turn and she ends up being drugged to fall asleep and have men spend time with her, under one provision – no penetration.

The film is slow, quiet and bare and features little music or dialogue. The story is played out at a deliberate pace in purposeful scenes that are full of subtle emotion. Despite the large amount of nudity and sexual language, I wouldn’t class the film as erotic. It is actually quite depressing. Browning’s character has few friends and spends her evenings craving attention and affection from strangers. She also takes part in humiliating acts of medical experimentation and partakes in drug abuse, possibly to escape ‘herself’.

The film is a brave choice for Emily Browning who was last seen in Sucker Punch,(reviewed here) a film with a very dodgy attitude towards women. In this she is rarely clothed on screen and has to deal with some quite degrading scenes. She is much better here than in the aforementioned crime against narrative cinema however and lets her face and body do the acting. Her face is often expressionless and she appears to be floating through it and life, even when she is not drugged. Despite a better performance here, and a more natural one too, I think the jury is still out as to whether she can successfully move into less grubby cinema.  

My main problem with the film is that it is just really lackluster. The idea is fairly interesting and it has a pleasing minimalist and blank look to it which compliments Browning’s own looks but it wasn’t in the least bit exciting or interesting to watch. The emotional scenes are not and one scene in particular in which an old man tells a very long story had me reaching for my phone to check twitter, this despite also having a nude Emily Browning in shot. The ending is unsatisfying and confusing and by that point I’d completely lost interest. To be kind to the film, it is shot very beautifully and has an interesting concept but it is disappointing in its execution.

4/10

Sucker Punch

I really don’t know where to begin with this terrible, misogynistic excuse for a film. The plot is as good a place as any but I don’t even know how to put it into words. As far as I could tell, Emily Browning (seen here in Sleeping Beauty) plays a girl who after the death of her mother, accidently kills her sister and is committed to a mental asylum. The asylum is populated entirely by good looking women in their early 20s. She is told that she will require four items to escape the asylum before she is lobotomized and for some reason enters a fantasy world where she attempts to find them. There are two fantasy worlds with one inside the other. In the first she is, for some reason a kind of lap dancer/prostitute. This world is populated by young women dancing around in their underwear. Why a 20 year old woman’s fantasy would be to be trapped in an evil lap dancing club I don’t know. The second level of fantasies occurs when she starts to dance. During these, Browning is transported, along with four other girls to some sort of battle scene where they must defeat the bad guy to get the map/knife/whatever they are looking for. During these scenes, the girls wear different skimpy outfits. And other than some borderline rape scenes, that’s basically it.

The film is massively over stylised. Zack Snyder well is known for this and although it worked ok in Watchmen, here it just looked stupid. The opening five minutes felt like a music video and from there on in it was a mixture of a computer game and a fourteen year old boy’s daydream. There were far too many slow motion shots which all zoomed in slowly. It was repetitive and unnecessary. The film dragged on and the slow motion made it feel even longer. By the time Browning’s character went in to her third fantasy featuring a Lord of the Rings style Orcs vs Knights battle, I let out a grown as I realised we were only about half way through.

This is the most video game like film I’ve ever watched. Each fantasy acts as a level which the characters must complete before moving onto the next and the CGI was like watching a trailer for a fantasy game. Browning’s character even dressed like a Japanese girl in one of those platform-fighting games.

Like all women, the cast wear their 'sex clothes' to coffee mornings

The film seems to suggest that the objectification of women is somehow empowering or makes them stronger. I find this assumption to be disgusting. I’m a little surprised that the film was even made given its clearly misogynistic tones. Why if the female characters are constantly on the brink of being raped are they seen in their own fantasies as fetishised versions of themselves? I would have thought that the fantasy versions of themselves would be as un-sexual as possible but instead we see them dressed as ‘sexy school girls’ in more up skirt shots than you’d find in the Daily Star. This film’s sexual politics are so unbelievably skewed that I am surprised that the actors agreed to appear in it.

The acting isn’t atrocious but when all the actors have to do is dress as sex workers and fight imaginary monsters, there’s not much you can do wrong. The Very Hungry Caterpillar probably has more dialogue than this film and that story is more compelling. The actors spend half of their time posing in their underwear and the rest of the time kicking giant Samurai warriors or German soldiers with red eyes.

For a film that contains so much action and titillation, it is incredibly boring. I think its astonishing that I was bored by two hours of scantily clad young women hitting monsters but I didn’t care what happened or when or even why. There is one nice moment towards the end where I thought to myself “Ahh that’s why she…” but for the other 108 minutes I was left feeling bored and angry. I don’t know why the film was made. If people want to see near naked women, they can go online. If they want to play a video game, they can. If they want to watch a film, they should avoid this pile of nonsense crap.

1/10