I found something so fascinating about this film. I cannot decide whether it was the unwavering feeling of intrigue, admiration and beauty in a film with undoubtedly confronting and vulgar scenes or the beautiful costumes but I loved it all so much. There is no denying that this film was unsettling and confronting, but the juxtaposition was done so beautifully that I remained captivated the entire sitting. This feels like a film that you just have to watch to appreciate (and perhaps google the meaning after which I won't deny that I did.) Pure genius.
My favourite part of the film were the costumes worn by the girls at the dinner party, and also the scenes in which she does the lab tests for money (fourth frame.) it was very difficult to watch as she put the tube down her throat, but i found this insanely clever. Here is a film review that explains why in words better than I ever could:
"Lucy’s ambivalence towards sex is also expressed in the film’s
refusal to sexualise any of what is on screen. No actual acts of sex are
shown and the extensive shots of naked or half naked characters are
cold and detached, sometimes bordering on the absurd in the case of the
dinner parties with the lingerie-wearing waiting staff. A common
critique of pornography, and the appropriation of the pornographic
aesthetic in mainstream culture, is that images that have adopted such
endlessly replicated and industrialised representations of sexuality are
in fact drained of any actual eroticism or sensuality. By visually and
narratively presenting various situations where the expression of
sexuality is artificial, Sleeping Beauty appropriates this idea
and prevents the viewer from engaging with the sexual content in any
emotional way. The dominant gaze of heterosexual men is thus exposed and
therefore denied, allowing the film to delve deeper into ideas of
intimacy and violation.
The men who pay to be in the room with Lucy while she is drugged asleep are repeatedly told that no penetration is allowed, further fitting in with the film’s absence of what is typically regarded as sex. In fact, the only time we actually see Lucy penetrated is in the opening, and then one subsequent scene later, when she swallows a balloon attached to a long tube for a medical experiment she’s being paid to take part in. Using the sterile environment of a laboratory for this visceral and unconventionally invasive, yet consensual, violation of her body sets up the film perfectly."
The men who pay to be in the room with Lucy while she is drugged asleep are repeatedly told that no penetration is allowed, further fitting in with the film’s absence of what is typically regarded as sex. In fact, the only time we actually see Lucy penetrated is in the opening, and then one subsequent scene later, when she swallows a balloon attached to a long tube for a medical experiment she’s being paid to take part in. Using the sterile environment of a laboratory for this visceral and unconventionally invasive, yet consensual, violation of her body sets up the film perfectly."
Thomas Caldwell, 2011
Cinema Autopsy
(click for link)
Cinema Autopsy
(click for link)
So obsessed with this film, sigh !
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