New Sydney production Sleeping Beauty – the directorial debut of novelist Julia Leigh – was barely a blip on anyone’s radar until an announcement of its spot in Cannes’ exalted Official Competition and a knockout trailer got cinephile pulses racing a few months ago. Now the cat’s out of the bag, and it’s… well, the kind of dime-a-dozen slab of festival-circuit filler that’d pass by unnoticed if it didn’t star a frequently naked It-girl (Emily Browning, playing a young medical student inducted into the world of high-class prostitution).
With its exquisite tableau framing, and anti-naturalistic approach to performance that evokes masters of chilly exactitude (Kubrick, Greenway, Haneke et al), Sleeping Beauty is an immersive mood piece, and Browning gives it her all, often suggesting a life beyond the parameters of her cipher character. But Leigh’s elliptical storytelling eventually tips over from admirably un-spoonfed to lazy. It’s not an easy film by any means, and has been given some fairly glib dismissals since its Cannes premiere; a kneejerk reaction to its po-faced depiction of the subjugation of female bodies. But it’s understandable, considering that Leigh’s vision rarely strays beyond surface provocations and shopworn artistic gestures – conveying alienation, de-eroticising sex, implicating the audience as voyeurszzzzz…
The film opens with Browning’s gag reflex being tested during a medical operation, and it’s an image that embodies the Leigh’s dubious aspirations. In theory, I can commend getting the Richard Wilkinses of the world up in arms. But until Leigh sets her sights higher than showing withered elderly penises and having her actors theatrically enunciate dialogue like “make sure the lipstick matches your labia”, her status as a major new voice in Australian cinema remains in check.
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Terrence Malick’s sparse body of work – 5 languid, dreamy films dating from 1973’s Badlands to this latest – tends to inspire much obnoxiously hyperbolic praise from his many, fervent admirers. And since I consider myself among them, I’d suggest the uninitiated read elsewhere to avoid annoyance. The much-anticipated Tree of Life is a major, major achievement that, in its crazy ambition and cosmic, 2001-like scope, is enough to reduce every other film to cinders.
At its core lies a presumably autobiographical story of Malick’s childhood in Texas, as recalled by the briefly glimpsed middle-aged Jack (Sean Penn, his top-billing something of a red herring) in the present, mooning about an alien-looking Houston cityscape. It’s subtly established to be the anniversary of his brother’s death at 19, and Malick begins with the fragmented glimpses of mum and dad (Jessica Chastain & Brad Pitt, respectively) receiving the news, inter-cut with the present-day Jack. In a digression that’s sure to provoke bafflement and awe in equal measure, we cut right back to a 15-minute origins-of-time sequence: yes, Malick is audacious enough to include dinosaurs, the rings of Saturn and family melodrama in the same film.
However much of a stretch this passage seems, it’s nonetheless rooted in the characters’ psychology; who hasn’t balmed grief or alienation by contemplating themselves as mere blips in eternity? Likewise, Malick’s inimitable poetics (chiefly free-associative montage and ruminative voiceover), however experimental, make these universal existential questions readily accessible for anyone willing to jump in the deep end. Tree of Life emerges, miraculously, not as a work of hermetic pretension, but rather an open and probing invitation to reach alongside it. It’s really purty, too.
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