DVD Release: Sleeping Beauty

BDVD Release Date: April 10, 2012
Price: DVD $24.98
Studio: IFC


Sleeping Beauty movie scene

Emily Browning (l.) takes a classic fairy tale to the next level in Sleeping Beauty.

Sleeping Beauty, a 2011 erotic film drama that retells the classic myth by turning its heroine into a sex worker, is helmed by first-time director Julia Leigh, who also penned the screenplay.

“Presented” by filmmaker Jane Campion (The Piano), the unrated Sleeping Beauty stars Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) as a beautiful university student possessed by the kind of radical passivity that prompts her to let coin tosses decide random sexual encounters.

After answering an ad in the student newspaper for a lingerie waitress, Lucy is secretly initiated into the job of a “Sleeping Beauty.” The job entails being sedated and falling asleep in a bed, into which crawl paying customers looking to enact their deepest fantasies with Lucy’s body. Giving herself in absolute submission to her clients becomes an unnerving sensation for Lucy, who allows her experiences to slowly bleed into her daily life. Ultimately she must develop the courage to break free of the virtual spell she’s under and discover what happens to her while she sleeps.

Noted by critics for its unique depiction of feminine sexuality as its tracks a young woman’s reckless descent into a world of erotic desires, Sleeping Beauty, an Australian production, played film festival and theatrical dates around the world before launching on a limited run in U.S. arthouse theaters in December, 2011.

Oh, and this film has no connection to Catherine Breillat’s 2010 film The Sleeping Beauty, which also explored female sexuality via the well-known fairy tale.

Take a look at the titillating and, yes, sort of disturbing trailer:

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.