Thursday, June 7, 2012

The Sleeping Beauty


An evil witch sets a curse upon a newborn, appearing like a specter, unseen but powerful. The curse condemns the baby girl to death. Three fairies appear and adapt the spell, so that the girl will prick herself with a thorn at six, and sleep and dream for a hundred years. She will wake in a modern world though, confused and unable to cope with the new world. She has many adventures though, living at first on a farm with a boy who is devolves from her friend to a teenaged, annoyed older brother. Then, a snow-covered landscape, and tent in the middle of it. She wakes at sixteen and is penetrated literally and figuratively by a world she doesn’t understand. Catherine Breillat’s fittingly dreamy, weird, and melancholy story is festooned with great color and contained settings, an it shows the destruction of a tale as well as the destruction of a girl who was doomed from the start. The film has many problems with pacing, but it makes up for that with its sad sensibility that pervades through each story.

★★★/5

No comments:

Post a Comment