Cannes Film Festival
“My vagina is not a temple.” So says terse, inscrutable college student Lucy, her dry conviction belying an edgeless china-doll face, immediately after being told (instructed, even) otherwise by an employer with a less-than-honorable stake in the matter. It’s a loaded line, one that reveals she knows much more than her elders think she does — yet much less than she thinks she does — and it’s one of several moments in “Sleeping Beauty,” Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s unnervingly precise directorial debut, that denude sex of any movie mystique it usually carries.
If that makes the film sound explicitly carnal, it isn’t: the words “no penetration” are repeated so often in the script as to became a mantra, and it sticks to that promise. But in telling the story of a girl falling into the most eerily art-directed prostitution ring this side of a Freemason hazing ceremony, Leigh’s way revisionist fairytale bluntly points out the ways in which our society has over-designed sexual experience even as it has undervalued raw human contact; “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Touch” might have been a more specific title.
[Due to my usual sloppy planning, we’re doubling up on this series with two entries a day, so as to be finished in time for next week. Catch up with all the Cannes Check posts so far