News

Release Date: Nov. 8, 2011

Price: DVD $27.99

Studio: Strand Releasing

The Sleeping Beauty is the second film in a planned trilogy of movies wherein French provocateur Catherine Breillat (Anatomy of Hell, The Last Mistress), explores female sexuality via a classic fairy tale.

The first movie in the series was writer/director Breillat’s 2009 Blue Beard and the third, still in the planning stages, will be her interpretation (deconstruction?) of the tale of Beauty and the Beast.

Also adding in elements from Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 story The Snow Queen, drama-fantasy The Sleeping Beauty follows the tale of young Anastasia. Cursed at birth by an evil fairy, Anastasia is destined to prick her finger and die at the age of 16. But a trio of fairy sisters devise an alternate plan so that rather than die, Anastasia will sleep for 100 years and live in a world of dreams. Through her active dream life, Anastasia will find love,...

Like many other great directors, Catherine Breillat returns repeatedly to the same themes and subject matter. But her followers know that she likes to throw curveballs, and her latest, The Sleeping Beauty (La belle endormie), is one of her biggest surprises. Breillat plans a trilogy of fairy tales, and the film that started the series, 2009's Blue Beard (Barbe Bleue), stuck reasonably close to genre, providing a good opportunity to assess her filmmaking personality against the backdrop of a traditional story. I expected the same of The Sleeping Beauty, but the game has changed radically. This time, Breillat is not content to refract the fairy tale through the prism of her temperament: instead, she uses the pretext of children's storytelling as camouflage to enable one of her most daring leaps into abstraction.

In retrospect, the first clue that Breillat is after bigger game is that, whereas Blue Beard maintains a...

Last December I deemed Catherine Breillat’s postmodern Bluebeard one of my favorite films of the year. So I was eager to see what the quirky French director would bring to the tale of Sleeping Beauty – especially with so many others adapting the property as of late. Thankfully, she did not disappoint. Like Bluebeard, The Sleeping Beauty is imbued with an offbeat and surreal sense of style that makes it a curious joy to behold. For those unfamiliar, the closest comparison to Breillat’s visual style is Terry Gilliam, whose works is so weird and wonderful that it’s hard to care that the plot is flimsy or confusing. Yes, if you’re in search of plot, pick a different theater. But if you want something striking and inventive with an ever-present sense of danger, The Sleeping Beauty is for you.

The drama begins with the birth of a beautiful little princess named Anastasia.