Remember the Sleeping Beauty story of your childhood? You know, that family friendly, romantic fantasy musical? Ok, now take out everything but the beautiful girl and the fantasy, add a lot of soft core and inexplicable behavior.
The 2012 Sleeping Beauty is a complete enigma. I suppose it’s about a young student exploring her sexuality, or maybe exploiting her body for financial gain. Ultimately I arrived at the conclusion that our lovely Lucy was searching for her true self. In the classic modern single gal mode she signed up for any and all experiences offered to her. All those drugs, unexplained relationships, just plain weird habits, and random sexual encounters added up to a modern upside down fairy tail. Instead of getting the prince, Lucy is searching for a genuine feeling. We don’t have a clue what makes her tick and neither does she.
For about an hour and a half you will be completely baffled by our lead character. Clearly she is working her way through college by taking odd jobs such as a test rat in white walled labs and office drudgery in a perpetual paper pushing office. Who could blame Lucy for jumping at the chance of making some big bucks when she hooks up with a kinky temp agency.
Initially she is hired to serve rich people food in some fancy private club. The catch? All the waitresses wear racy lingerie and allowed themselves to be admired/leered at by old men. But wait, there’s more.
Lucy keeps getting promoted to more challenging and lucrative assignments.
Finally the audience gets to see the sleeping beauty reference. Not to spoil things for you, let me just say she drinks a potion, she sleeps, and old men do mysterious things to her. Yes, human sexuality can be perverse. You will see many examples of this, some full frontal, and behavior including random acts of unexpected kindness and disturbing brutality.
This isn’t your granny’s Sleeping Beauty. Or if it is, she didn’t write a book about it so you’ll never know.
Sleeping Beauty (2012) opens Friday, Jan 26,at brave independent theaters near you.
