The Australian art film “Sleeping Beauty” may be a wicked feminist satire about how male sexual demands enslave young women. Or it may not be. In any case, you may find it hard to notice anything but the nonstop nudity and debauchery of a pretty college student.
Emily Browning plays a slutty youth bored by a variety of menial jobs who drifts into a gig as a lingerie-clad waitress for a strange dinner party of old men. That leads to a gig as a professional sleeping beauty: She takes a drug that knocks her out while lecherous men come and go in her bed (though they aren’t allowed to rape her).
“Sleeping Beauty” is frequently surreal, and doesn’t give up its secrets easily, but the title character could be read as a parody of today’s liberated young woman, someone who is so at ease with strings-free sex and who so undervalues herself that she effectively becomes a willing and disposable plaything for powerful men. As blithely passive as she is, though, she is far easier to sympathize with than the loathsome men who use her. Is it still a man’s world?
Debut writer-director Julia Leigh has a Luis Bunuel-like method of balancing the mundane with the absurd, and her willingness to position her protagonist as an accomplice instead of a mere victim suggests an intriguing level of grappling with her topic.
I’m not, finally, sure what Leigh is saying — but she is a filmmaker with a voice.