Sleeping Beauty (2011 film)

The plot of the film is an allusion and reminiscence of the famous biblical story " Susanna and the Elders ." An Australian student, Lucy, who works on several jobs, has problems with housing and money and, according to an ad in a student newspaper, she finds another part-time job as a waitress in a private elite club serving dishes to clients in lingerie. At various times, she is invited to a country villa by a phone call, where she sleeps under the influence of a powerful sleeping pill, while older members of the club do what she pleases with her, the only restriction is the prohibition of penetration , which clients of the establishment are warned about every time before contacting with Lucy villas. Gradually, the main character more and more wants to find out what happens to her during those hours about which she does not remember anything.

When she is fired from another side job in the office, Lucy buys a hidden miniature video camera in an electronics store. She easily accepts the large dose of the potent Prozac antidepressant drug proposed by her cafe colleague, which she is categorically forbidden by the hostess of the villa, Clara, and then goes for a night bath with this colleague, waking up the next morning in her apartment with him in bed. Suddenly, Clara calls her and asks urgently to come. The driver is already waiting outside the door. Lucy is bad and is vomiting on her way to the mansion. When Lucy arrives, she lies to Clara, saying that she feels "fine", and then asks Clara for permission to find out what happens when she is sleeping. Clara refuses, saying that this will be a possible risk of blackmail for her clients. When Lucy goes to bed and is left alone, she pulls out a portable camera hidden in her mouth, as well as a probe, swallowing which for medical research was one of her part-time jobs. Staggering under the influence of a dose of sleeping pills in tea given to her by Clara, she was still able to attach a miniature camera to a vase in the niche of the wall of the room.

The client who came in with Clara is an old man with a muscular body, who was once the very first to sleep with Lucy earlier, but now he also drinks Clara’s tea, and in his case, this is a tea with a four-dose dose of sleeping pills, which at his request puts Clara’s tea as means for his suicide. After some time, Clara comes into the sleeping room, opens the windows and checks the old man's pulse making sure that he is dead. She tries to wake Lucy to finally agree to her request in this special case and show her a client who can no longer be afraid of blackmail, but Clara cannot get Lucy because of the mixed effect of Prozac and sleeping pills in tea and she understands that the girl is depressed and she is on the verge of death. Clara makes her mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration and enlivens Lucy. A girl wakes up and discovers a naked man lying nearby, touching which she realizes that he is cold and dead. This causes her fierce cry - death is again next to her even in a dream, just like earlier in real life, when her closest drug addict called on Lucy to die in her arms. The film ends with a replay of the video shot by Lucy's hidden camera mounted on a vase in a wall niche: an old man, tired of life, just came quietly to sleep with an eternal sleep next to a beautiful young sleeping beauty.

• Emily Browning - Lucy
• Rachel Blake - Clara
• Michael Dorman - Cook
• Henry Nixon - Mike
• Ewan Leslie - Birdmann
• Mirra Foulkes - Sophie

• “To the best of the fascinating, but not stupid Australian debut about female loneliness.” - Afisha.ru ^[1]
• “The directorial debut of the Australian writer Julia Lee is striking not only in the fact that with numerous nudity and a camera numbing in a burst of voyeurism, a movie turns out to be if not chaste, but at least spared from any eroticism.” - Timeout.ru
• “There is only the surface of the body, the opportunity to admire it and the operations performed with it. The camera captures this body in all the beauty of a detailed frame, but not with voyeuristic pleasure, but from the position of an observer deprived of emotions, which makes the picture similar to the works of Michael Haneke. ”- Gazeta.ru
• "The main themes of the film - apathy and the nearness of death, sleeping sexuality and awakening feminism - are close to Australian movie grandmother Jane Campion: the only female director to have the Golden Palm branch blessed her ward Julia Lee and helped her get into the Cannes competition." - Kommersant .ru

• Young and beautiful

• Official movie website
• Sleeping Beauty on the Internet Movie Database