Sleeping Beauties is 'beautifully strange and melancholic'

Vadim Glowna's House of the Sleeping Beauties depicts themes of aging, loneliness, escape and desire. It is an adaptation of Nobel-prize winning author Yasunari Kawabata's novella of same name.

House of the Sleeping Beauties tells the story of Edmond (Vadim Glowna), a 60-something-year-old businessman who lost his daughter and wife in a car crash many years ago. Blighted by loneliness and depression, Edmond's friend Kogi (Maximilian Schell) insists that he visit a peculiar "maison" run by Madame (Angela Winkler). It's an establishment that houses young women who consent to being drugged into unconsciousness. Old men are permitted to spend the night with these "sleeping beauties" that will not wake until the man has left in the following morning.

Intrigued, pitiful Edmond visits this house again and again. While lying with these young girls he is able to escape his age and his misery. Addicted to the facility, he soon becomes aware of how crooked the House of the Sleeping Beauties really is. This film is striking in its ability to handle the content without falling into blatant perversion. The most noteworthy aspect of this film is the brilliant, creative camerawork. Each scene is exquisitely framed, complete with very unique shots. The editing is smooth as well and keeps the film captivating. "It is about transition, remembrance, mourning, guilt, loneliness, sex and death, eroticism and dying. These are the main threads of this film," states director Glowna. "When I read Kawabata's book for the first time I thought: What a beautifully strange and melancholic story."

Beautifully strange and melancholic are probably the best words to describe this film, too. The story touches on disturbing and all too often flirts with the recurring concept of mystery and tragedy.

There are rare moments of charm within the piece's characters, with Edmond being the only dynamic figure in the movie. If it weren't for Ciro Cappellari, the director of photography, and editor Charlie Lézin, House of the Sleeping Beauties would run the high risk of qualifying as a generally lackluster film. To give this film the blunt critique it needs: House of the Sleeping Beauties was an interesting idea, was respectively carried through, beautifully shot - however it lacked passion and direction. This isn't to say it wasn't constantly enthusiastic or a boring film, but the sensations experienced by Edmond were often muddled and the wickedness of the House was not captured as well as it could have been. He could have delved deep into Madame's demented psyche and delivered a shocking film. Glowa frequently groped at being startling in a subtle, tasteful way but merely fell short in delivering any kind of feeling and depth to his characters or the themes of the film. The director's montages of Edmond's memories were fairly haunting. However, they were limited. He attempted a cryptic stance and didn't quite meet the mark.

Edmond's past coupled with the escape he felt being with these young, sleeping girls "add up to an insomnia that makes Edmond a stroller, a wanderer through the night. Edmond, pushed by his feelings of guilt, his craving for an embrace and tenderness at the end of his life, has just one thing left - he will die of a broken heart, but redeemed." It seems that Glowna is more eloquent in describing his film than in executing it. Despite its flaws, House of the Sleeping Beauties is a movie worth experiencing. It does have a quality of beauty to it, despite the distracting obscurities.