When Australian writer-director Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty made its debut at Cannes last May, the responses among critics I talked to veered from bland outrage to vexed boredom. That doesn’t leave a lot of middle ground, and I had to see Sleeping Beauty a second time before I was reasonably sure what I thought about it. I’m still not reasonably sure what I think about it: The picture is clinical in its approach and its technique, yet it leaves so many questions unanswered — it’s straightforward in a vague, maddening way. It’s also strangely, obliquely compelling.
Emily Browning — who recently appeared as a mini-skirted vixen warrior in Sucker Punch and, a few years before that, as Violet in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events — plays Lucy, a perpetually broke Australian college student who needs to do a patchwork of jobs to make ends meet. She also has an odd mishmash of friends whose respective roles in her life are never clearly explained: There’s some science dude in a lab coat who’s grateful that she’ll allow him to regularly drop a narrow tube way down her throat; there’s also a shy, bookish shut-in gent (played by Ewen Leslie) who’s thrilled when she comes to visit him — and not just because she pours him a bowlful of cereal splashed liberally with vodka.
But the central events of Lucy’s life at this point are episodes through which she literally sleeps: After answering a newspaper ad, she becomes the employee of Clara (Rachael Blake), a cool blonde Tippi…
Amanda Marcum Amanda Peet Amanda Righetti Amanda Swisten Amber Arbucci Amber Brkich Amber Heard Amber Valletta America Ferrera Amerie
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