02/09/2010

Festival director Marco Müller said: “youth, in cinema, isn’t something that depends on birth records or the date on one’s passport”: it is no surprise, therefore, that Horizons, the most openly “innovative” section at the Venice Mostra, opened with the new film by Catherine Breillat, who is over 60, and continues to astonish viewers – even if she doesn’t always convince them – with films that are bizarre to say the least.

Her latest title Sleeping Beauty, like her previous one Blue Beard [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], is based on a fairytale of European tradition (and, more specifically, Charles Perrault’s version): it is not a simple adaptation, or a modern updating. It is, rather, a reinterpretation that deals with all the symbolic weight of this archetypal story.

Too often, and too superficially, associated with “scandalous” and shocking films (especially after the diptych with porn star Rocco Siffredi, Romance and Anatomy of Hell [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), Breillat is instead a director capable of great subtlety – she proved this, here in Venice, with one of her lesser-known titles, Brief Crossing – and one with a marked predilection for the transition from childhood and adolescence. An initiation into adult life, a fine and shadowy line illuminated first by curiosity and then by the discovery of sex.

It is this curiosity which animates young Anastasia (Carla Besnainou) who, at six years of age, is already reading about genitals and hermaphrodites. As soon as she is born, in a fairytale world of “once upon a time” (lensed by Denis Lenoir), the fairy Carabosse has mapped out for her a destiny of death, “improved” as much as possible by three younger and more generous colleagues: instead of falling asleep forever, the little girl will dream for exactly a century, waking up at 16.

Like in a sort of cinematic memento mori, symbols and references to passing time dominate the scene, including alarm clocks of all kinds (“they’re my army against sleep”, says the future sleeping beauty), and a line that would have appealed to Truffaut (“let’s put her to sleep for 100 years, childhood is never-ending!”).

After she has pricked herself on the spindle, the long dream follows, a triumph of symbolic figures (Rot, covered in pustules and swellings) and strange characters, dwarves and old hags, little gypsy girls and young men whose “awkward age”, puberty, doesn’t allow them to see the beauty of the world.

At the same time, there is an exploration of a femininity at first rejected (“I want to be called Vladimiro”), only to be discovered 100 years later. This initiation into sex but, above all, life, is less harsh than could have been expected from the director of A Real Young Girl, perhaps a little too smug in its own intellectualism, but certainly captivating.

(Translated from Italian)