This is one of three films I know of about this particular subject-- brothels that cater to older men, allowing them to sleep next to, but not actually penetrate, beautiful young girls who have been willingly drugged to sleep. These movies are not so much based on any real-life perversion (although I wouldn't want to bet that SOMEBODY out there doesn't have this particular fetish), but they rather have much more literary origins in the form of a Japanese novel. There was an earlier Japanese version of this novel called "The Room" made by the notorious "pink" director of colorfully titled movies like "Lolita Vibrator Torture". I haven't seen "The Room", but it's rather notorious because the director chose to give a cameo role to a REAL-LIFE murderer/cannibal (a Japanese guy who killed and partially ate a Dutch co-ed in Paris, but was unaccountably released from a French asylum to become a ghoulish, half-assed celebrity in Japan). Obviously, THAT really overshadowed the movie, which has never really received an international release.
More recently there was a 2011 English-language movie called "Sleeping Beauty" with Emily Browning, which is perhaps more accessible than this German movie since it is told from the point of a view of a beautiful young girl who works at this kind of brothel (it was also directed by a woman if that matters). This earlier movie lacks the nicest ass, I mean, nicest asset of the later movie in the form of Emily Browning, but it is generally more successful. As beautiful as Browning is and as much as I admire for being in such a movie, Maxmillian Schell is obviously a more experienced actor and really carries this German movie as a lonely morose widower who has lost his wife and daughter in an accident, but finds a strange solipsistic solace in a "house of sleeping beauties" and develops an interesting relationship with the house madame (Angela Winkler).
It's not a perfect movie by any means. Even though it's German, it seems to be rather badly dubbed into German and it is given to strange voice-overs by minor characters (like the old man's maid). It has a lot of female nudity, but no real sex, so I can see why many would find it boring. But at times it achieves a kind of sweet, morose poetry, and it certainly achieves an aura of general weirdness. It's worth checking out, as is the slightly inferior, but much more accessible "Sleeping Beauty".
