Every generation gets the Sleeping Beauty it deserves. In 2010, the French director Catherine Breillat gave us one that turns its back on the prince.
The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle Endormie) is a French fantasy drama written and directed by Breillat, freely adapted from Charles Perrault’s tale. It premiered in the Horizons competition at the 68th Venice Film Festival and went on to the Toronto and San Francisco international film festivals.
The dream, not the rescue
Where the folklore fixes its attention on a suitor’s attempts to wake the princess, Breillat does the opposite. Her film lives inside the hundred-year sleep, following the dreams of the girl while she slumbers. A fairy lets the six-year-old Anastasia wake as a sixteen-year-old — a device that lets Breillat trace the strange, uneven passage of adolescence through a sequence of dreams rather than a single kiss.
Reception
The result divided audiences in the way Breillat’s work usually does, but it was broadly well received — around three-quarters of critics surveyed on Rotten Tomatoes approved, and Metacritic recorded generally favourable notices. Running a lean 82 minutes, with cinematography by Denis Lenoir, it remains one of the more quietly radical fairy-tale adaptations of its decade: a story about waiting, told from the side of the one who waits.