Sleeping Beauty (2011)

This is a re-imagining of the Sleeping Beauty Story in modern times. 'Sleeping Beauty' is a university student who holds several part-time jobs to pay the bills, and judging by her lifestyle, is unhappy with her current life. She meets random people in bars and does pretty much whatever is suggested to her, looking as though she doesn't care all the while. When the bills start to pile up, she applies for a job as an erotic server, and eventually ends up being promoted to being drugged and sleeping (no penetration) with paying customers. She has only one 'friend' she visits on a regular basis, a man whose relationship to her is unclear, but we only ever see her break down or cry when she's with him, and we never see them do anything sexual together. One day she's given her normal assignment, but the guest asks for a suicide and she wakes up to a deceased old man, and the movie ends with her screaming at realizing this, and maybe other things too.

I heard several negative reviews about this film, but I actually didn't mind it. It was a little more artsy than your average blockbuster, but all of the main elements were there. The girl is not present in her life, she's figuratively and symbolically asleep. She indulges in many forms of escapism,  drugs and sex with strangers being prime examples. She attacks her body as violently as she can, without actually doing any physical damage, in effect attacking her mind. On more than one occasion she hooks up with strangers she meets in bars, or takes drugs some random person hands her. At the interview, the woman informs her that she need not worry because there would not be any penetration and that her vagina was a temple. She responded by flat-out denying that, and we can repeatedly see this disrespect she does to her own body. She actually burns some of the money she makes on her very first assignment, removing the practical reason for her degradation. What she does never seems to faze her either. She approaches everything with a cool disdain, if not with blatant apathy. The only time she shows any real emotion is when she's with her seemingly one and only friend, named Birdman. In a way, he might be her prince. **Spoiler** The turning point for her, the moment she begins wanting to break out of this apathy is with his death... so he wouldn't be her prince in the traditional sense, but his death is like a symbolic 'kiss' that begins to awaken her. In fact, he never even kissed her. He kept saying that he really wanted to, but wasn't good enough, or wasn't ready, and he was the most stable thing in her life. She often wound up on his doorstep after a rough night, and he would sooth her, no matter the hour. And that soothing was never sexual in nature either, unlike the damaging lifestyle she chose to lead. A good scene between them is him holding her on the pullout couch watching the nature channel on mute as he narrates, and she begins crying. He was more of a refuge for her than anything else. **Spoiler end** I also think the end of the movie is her full awakening. After her assignment she wakes up next to a corpse, and she is understandably shaken and disgusted and screams, but it isn't just a short scream of disgust or horror. She screams continually, like she's just woken up and can't understand where she is or how she got there.

There are also several situations external to the girl herself that accentuate and explore the idea of 'awakening'. There is this good scene with the first patron who comes to her in her drugged state and he tells a lengthy story about a folktale he read, and how he himself is inhibited and was in his own way 'asleep' for most of his life. The execution of this story was carefully thought out and there is a lot of symbolism and suggestion supporting the central theme of the story, which makes this one of those films you could watch several times and pick out something new with each viewing.

There is nudity in this film, but I wouldn't see anyone watching this to turn themselves on. Basically, if you've seen a naked person before it shouldn't upset you too much as they just walk around. There aren't any sex scenes or erotic dances or anything of that nature.