Title: Sleeping Beauty

Opens: December 2, 2011

Whatever you may think of this movie, you’ll likely agree: Emily Browning, best known as a child actress in Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” deserves every dollar that the studio paid her. A pretty young woman now in her twenty-third year, she is required by writer-director Julia Leigh to play a good part of her time on the screen completely naked-which is probably no big deal-but she also has to allow a group of old pervs in one instance to toss her around by dropping her on the floor; in another to talk dirty to her while putting his chubby fingers into her mouth; to have her ear singed by a lighted cigarette; and worst of all to have her face licked by a fat, shaven-headed slimeball who simply had the money to buy into this fantasy. In the story, it probably helped considerably that she is comatose while all this is going on, but in real life, the actress does well in permitting all this base activity without displaying even a smirk or a twist of the nose.

“Sleeping Beauty” could be called a sleeper hit if by that term you mean that it’s so soporific that the audience will have trouble staying awake. There is hardly any music on the soundtrack to pump our adrenaline, a function that would come n handy particularly when one of the old guys delivers the dullest monologue that you’re likely to hear in the movies this year. I’d imagine that the audience for Leigh’s picture could be those who want to see a lovely girl in the altogether, though some snobs may appreciate what they consider art despite the fact that this so-call art is nothing but pretentiousness.

Emily Browning performs in the role of Lucy, a college girl in Sydney who could use the money and who spends a good deal of time working an assortment of gigs. One such job involves allowing a research scientist to insert a rod down her throat with an attached balloon. Another finds her washing tables in a restaurant. Yet a third job has her duplicating and collating masses of documents in a large office. Here is somebody who is passive and willing to do whatever the employer wishes as long as she could pocket some bucks.

The most bizarre work involves catering to rich old men who cannot accept their loss of virility. In one scene she pours brandy for the gathering under the watchful eye of Clara, an unusual madam working out of her spacious, well-furnished home. Other women serve the men by standing about with exposed breasts announcing courses from caviar to squab. That sounds almost normal. What gives the film its title is that in return for $250 hard cash per night, she accepts a sleeping potion from Clara that renders her comatose while male customers spend the night doing whatever they wish, though the regulations forbid penetration.

Julia Leigh, in her freshman film, may be showing us that Lucy is passive to the point of masochism: it’s not until the shocking conclusion of the story that she-like Rod Steiger’s character in “The Pawnbroker”–witnesses a scene which is to her so horrific that she feels for the first time in her life.

Despite the soporific proceedings-which include Lucy’s relationships with a number of men, one of whom is terminally ill-the theme is given ink by two major authors. In Yasunari Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties,” the horrified reader comes to see that the sexual excitement is a result not of rejuvenescence, but of a flirtation with death. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” begins with, “”The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

Emily Browning has a doll-like beauty that invites comparison to Charles Perrault’s fairy tale which finds a wicked witch putting the title character into a 100-year sleep. I’m horrified to think that some mothers will take their small charges to Leigh’s film thinking that it’s another version of Perrault.

Unrated. 110 minutes. (C) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall – C