Catherine Breillat has spent a career refusing the stories women are handed. It was only a matter of time before she came for the fairy tales themselves.
A provocateur turns to Perrault
Breillat is one of French cinema's most uncompromising directors, long preoccupied with female desire, power and the violence quietly folded into how women are looked at — the force behind Romance, Fat Girl and Anatomy of Hell. In a later phase she turned, unexpectedly, to the fairy tale, following her Bluebeard with The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle Endormie). It is a characteristic move: take the most familiar, most sanitised of children's stories and reopen it, asking what it was really about before it was made safe.
The girl who refuses to merely sleep
Breillat's reworking refuses the passive heroine at the heart of the original. Rather than a princess who simply lies waiting to be woken by a prince, her sleeping beauty is sent on a long, strange, restless journey through her enchanted sleep — a dream-quest in which she travels, encounters other worlds and characters, and is shaped by experience instead of merely preserved by it. The hundred years of slumber become an interior odyssey, not a suspension. The point is pointed: a girl's story need not be the story of her waiting.
Beauty and unease together
Visually the film has the lush, candlelit, painterly quality of the best dark fairy tales, but Breillat keeps it unsettled — the enchantment always shadowed by something more adult and ambivalent. She is interested in the exact moment a child's story tips into something about desire, agency and loss, and she lingers there deliberately. The title the original post gave it captures the spirit perfectly: life is not a fairy tale — and neither, in Breillat's hands, is the fairy tale.
Reading it again in 2026
The culture has spent the years since loudly reconsidering the stories it tells girls — revisiting, subverting and rewriting the old tales. Breillat got there early and went further than most, with a rigour and a refusal to flatter that the glossier revisions rarely match. The film belongs in our archive with the other works that reopen received narratives, from the fight to preserve women's cinema to the staged dreamworlds of Vikram Kushwah. Breillat lets the princess dream — but never lets her simply sleep.