FILMS/
THE SLEEPING BEAUTY
Screenings
Tue, Apr 26
6:15 / Kabuki
Wed, Apr 27
6:30 / Kabuki
La belle endormie
World Cinema
France,
2010,
82 min
CREDITS
- prod
-
Jean-François Lepetit, Sylvette Frydman
- scr
-
Catherine Breillat
- cam
-
Denis Lenoir
- editor
-
Pascale Chavance
- cast
-
Carla Besnaïnou, Julia Artamanov, Kérian Mayan, David Chausse
- source
-
Strand Releasing, 6140 West Washington Boulevard, Culver City CA 90232. FAX: 310-836-7510. EMAIL: david@strandreleasing.com.
On the heels of the mesmeric Bluebeard (SFIFF 2009), French auteur Catherine Breillat again delves into the piquant fairy tales of Charles Perrault for this singular, sparkling film, a reverie and rumination over slumbering lives and awakening sexual and mortal consciousness. Opening on some half-dreamed late-modern world, The Sleeping Beauty playfully sets up the story of young princess Anastasia (a delightfully quick and valiant Carla Besnaïnou), cursed at birth by a wicked fairy/crone to die in her sixth year. Fortunately for Anastasia, three beautiful young fairies counter the spell, at least a bit, sending the six-year-old instead into a 100-year slumber, from which she will wake into contemporary French society a ripe 16-year-old. First, though, our heroine, a defiant tomboy, will wander long in a dream world. There she finds and loses an adoptive brother, Peter, who lives with his mother in a country house set evocatively beside a train track. Going in search of the roving Peter—her brother, prince and first love—she meets a series of young princes and princesses (“Blue bloods stick together,” she explains) in strange faraway lands before a real-life prince, grandson of Peter, wakes her into her 16-year-old self. From there, another awakening begins, or perhaps one spell is broken and another cast. Breillat’s aesthetic fashions a world at once palpable and ethereal, itself a waking dream, with a ludic insouciance that delights in combining allusive, painterly detail with makeshift and anachronistic improvisations. As much a tonic to the intellect as the senses, The Sleeping Beauty will keep you up all night.
—Robert Avila
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