Week 3

Sleeping Beauty’s cryptic themes deserve an especial deciphering.

The film itself, as mentioned by reviewer-in-the-positive Andrew O’Hehir, seems more concerned with the relationships between its vixens-for-hire than it is with generic heterosex-ploitation. To labour the point, Clara’s strictly no-penetration policy for clients, no matter how bloated their cheque-book, is clear evidence of more brewing beneath the films surface than fetishist indulgences. Yet somehow Leigh manages to imbue this eroticized Lynchian world with compensatory menace, even without a ‘brutal’ sex scene (which these types of films conventionally have in abundance).  This is done through severe cinematography and a reticent style (lauded as ‘opaque’) that serves to speak uncomfortable volumes about the incentives of the women selling themselves, dispelling cinematic myths about the archetypal Whore and removing Her kitschy glamour. Leigh wants such exaggerated depictions of women’s sexuality replaced with more realistic considerations.

It’s very much a purgative of Hollywood assumptions and repressions.

The fact that Campion has come to embody the contemporary ‘female vision’ in film, reveals subaqueous discussion points close to Sleeping Beauty’s languidly beating heart, seeing as Ms. Campion gave the film a very public stamp of approval.  This viewer speculates Sleeping Beauty is not merely a post-post-feminist argument against the abuses of distorted on-screen representation, but also a lament of women’s cloistering roles generally, not the least of which results in a stifling of Her cinematic voice. A general industry denial of the female vision.

Wasn’t  Kathryn Bigelow the first women in academy history to take Best Director? (for war epic The Hurt Locker). And that was only last year. The most female directors have done previous to this is garner a Best Original Screenplay, Sofia Copolla for example in 2003 with Lost in Translation (which had enough buzz for Best Picture and Director, but inexplicably lost out that year to Lord of the Rings). This isn’t because the few female directors who’ve been eligible don’t meet standards; this is because of misogynist anachronisms lingering in the conduct of countless mainstream institutions which it would be a ludicrous venture to list. In our 'liberal' society gender inequality is a familiar presence, despite an unjustified advocacy of a seamlessly just, equitable and utterly fictitious present.

We are not living in a post-feminist society.

If an existing idea is being marginalized it is because the reigning ideologies don't see it as profitable; which is to say, capitalism doesn’t have a use for feminism right now. But what to do with its lingering supporters? Discredit them of course, by saying their aims have been well-met, by giving feminism a fictional closure and making effective dissemination for the active naysayers virtually impossible.

Anyway, it’s surprising to find such dated prejudice alive and well in the arts; but then I guess that’s a liberal conceit, the assumption that liberal and equitable are synonymous.

More and more I’m convinced of cinemas power, and am in something like awe at the as yet unexplored possibilities of the medium; which in turn means I despair at the expensive, otherwise empty-calorie fare of films like The Smurfs, or any one of the current tween franchises.

Me, a Snob? You could say that.