Sleeping Beauty (2011) on Netflix
Lucy, a university student, answers a classified ad and meets Clara, who runs a service of young women at black-tie dinners. Clara offers her a paid role sleeping beside men.
- Netflix2.5/5
- IMDb5.3/1036,802 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes48%
Trailer
Plot summary
Lucy is studying at university and covers her tuition and rent with a patchwork of jobs: office work in the daytime, a restaurant in the evenings, and the occasional shift as a paid subject in a laboratory. She also looks after Birdmann, an alcoholic who wants more from her than she wants from him, though she likes having him around. Her sister's boyfriend keeps pressing her for rent. Needing another income, Lucy replies to a classified ad and is interviewed by Clara, who arranges lingerie modelling and catering for young women at black-tie dinners attended mostly by men. Clara inspects Lucy's body and gives her the name Sara for the work. A later request takes Lucy to a country mansion, where she is sedated and sleeps naked while paying men lie beside her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sleeping Beauty (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Mia Wasikowska was originally cast as the lead, Lucy, but dropped out when she was offered the title role in an adaptation of Jane Eyre; Emily Browning replaced her, as announced in February 2010.
- Julia Leigh's screenplay was loosely based on Yasunari Kawabata's The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Gabriel García Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and on a recurring nightmare in which she dreamt she was being filmed in her sleep.
- Sleeping Beauty premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival as the first Competition entry to be screened, and was the first Australian film in competition at Cannes since Moulin Rouge! in 2001.
- Emily Browning taught herself to meditate to film the scenes in which her character Lucy lies unconscious, saying she was not present in those scenes at all, so they had less effect on her.
