I try not to watch trailers. I do my best not to even read plotlines. In my position I am likely to see the movie anyway so what good does it do to know any more about it than is absolutely necessary?
So, when I posted the trailer for the Cannes Film Festival competition selection Sleeping Beauty yesterday and wrote “this already looks like a massive step up from Sucker Punch for [Emily] Browning” it would appear I may have spoke too soon as the two may essentially be one and the same.
Last night I ran into the Facebook page for Sleeping Beauty and came across a more complete synopsis for the film. I had glossed over the previous one, combine that with not watching the trailer and I essentially had no idea what the film was about.
So, I read the new synopsis, which is far more straight-forward than the one I posted yesterday.
Death-haunted, quietly reckless, Lucy is a young university student who takes a job as a Sleeping Beauty. In the Sleeping Beauty Chamber old men seek an erotic experience that requires Lucy’s absolute submission. This unsettling task starts to bleed into Lucy’s daily life and she develops an increasing need to know what happens to her when she is asleep.
After reading that, my curiosity was piqued as it appears Emily Browning must gravitate toward films where her characters will be morally debased throughout.
I moved to the Kubrick-esque, Eyes Wide Shut-era trailer with its Social Network approach to typeface. And depending on your manner of perspective this film draws more of a comparison to Sucker Punch than I would have ever imagined.
Sucker Punch featured a group of captive girls going off into imagination-land whenever their captors would decide to have their way with them. Rape and abuse was camouflaged by gun fights, zombie armies, dragons and robots. In Sleeping Beauty it would appear Browning’s character, Lucy, is a college student who takes part in a job that sees her working as a prostitute. The job calls for her to seduce a man and then willingly swallows a batch of Rohypnol so her male client can take advantage of her sexually.
The comparisons are obvious, but there are some differences to consider. Sucker Punch sought to gloss over and hide the fact terrible things were happening to its lead characters in favor of explosions and gun fights, whereas writer-director Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty doesn’t appear to shy away from anything.
Going further, it would be easy to say Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch exhibited what is wrong with our society as it chose to ignore the wrong-doing and instead went to a happier place until the evil was done. Essentially, instead of showing actual bloodshed in war torn Iraq the nightly news will give you a story about the pie eating contest downtown. If it bleeds, it leads… but only to a certain extent.
Snyder’s film also has the whole skimpy outfits and pornstar identities putting another black mark on its wall. Sleeping Beauty, by comparison, doesn’t look like it’s speaking to the same Japanese schoolgirl anime crowd, instead opting for a more visceral sense of realism.
Maybe this is where our moral conscience allows us to draw a distinction. Getting a sense of satisfaction and/or entertainment out of the hidden depravity and exploitation in Sucker Punch is bad, while a feeling of disgust for the more realistic and arty depiction of similar events in Sleeping Beauty makes it okay.
The tagline for Sleeping Beauty reads “You will go to sleep: you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed.” That’s pretty disturbing right? It also means we aren’t talking about the “mind-bending reality” Warner Bros. was selling Snyder’s video game-esque feature as, but we are sort of talking about the same scenario. The difference, I guess, is that in Sleeping Beauty Lucy signs up for her punishment whereas the girls in Sucker Punch were unwitting victims of circumstance. Is one worse than the other? Is one more acceptable?
Of course, I am making this comparison without having seen Sleeping Beauty and based on this alone I’m quite interested in seeing how it all plays out. This is part of what makes movies interesting and one of the reasons it frustrated the hell out of me when people would tell me I was “over-thinking” Sucker Punch. Sucker Punch was a terrible film, but it did have some interesting ideas behind it that were worth thinking about… they were just poorly executed.
So in an effort to start a discussion, here are a few distinctions about each film to consider:
I am obviously making a few assumptions when it comes to Sleeping Beauty, having not seen it, but for the sake of conversation assumptions had to be made. Now, what do you think?
Is there a difference if the girls are unwittingly subjected to abuse compared to girls who freely subject themselves to it? Take into account one conceals the abuse that’s taking place while the other appears to confront it head on. Does the fantasy element of one and the realism of the other make any difference?
I ask all of this because Sucker Punch was clearly aimed at a specific demographic, the 18-35 year-old male Comic Con crowd every marketer in the world chases after. Sleeping Beauty and it’s “Jane Campion Presents” lead-in, however, speaks more toward an art house crowd and I imagine won’t be put under similar scrutiny by those that attacked Sucker Punch. Essentially, in the interest of fair treatment, I am curious to hear which side of the fence you stand on, or if you see the two films as one and the same.
