We Need To Talk About Kevin
12 May, 2011 | By Mark Adams, chief film critic
Screendaily
Dir: Lynne Ramsay. UK. 2011. 110mins
A compulsively powerful adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s much acclaimed bestseller, Lynne Ramsay’s beautifully shot film about a mother and her relationship with the most problematic of children is an early strong entry to the Cannes competition and a film likely to receive positive critical attention. The strong cast and controversial storyline will boost distribution and further festival exposure is a given.
The structure of Shriver’s original book is based on a series of letters as mother Eva Khatchadourian seeks to discuss her son Kevin with her husband Franklin, and attempts to come to terms with his terrible involvement in a high school massacre. Of course the delayed drama of the source story - and the terrible implications of Kevin’s actions - mean that the film’s structure is complex as it weaves through various points of Eva and Kevin’s life. And while the terrible truth of what Kevin does is a slow reveal in the book it has to be developed in a slightly different way in the film adaptation.
The film is very much seen through the haunted and tormented eyes of Eva (with Tilda Swinton giving a mesmerising performance) and how her life changes after giving birth to a troubled son, though the three young performers who play Kevin - Ezra Miller as the teen version, Jasper Newell as the boy and Rock Duer as the toddler - are all quite astonishing as they consistently embody Kevin’s moody and dark sociopathic attitude.
The film is also distinctive through Seamus McGarvey’s luminous cinematography, the film’s striking colour palette and the artfully composed widescreen scenes. At times the song choices in the soundtrack are a little heavy handed, and the story does lag a little in the middle section, but We Need To Talk About Kevin remains an engrossingly tough film that really does deliver.... (Spoilers deleted.)
...At the heart of the story is the rarely tackled issue of maternal ambivalence, and while that was the subject much debated in reviews of the source novel in the film this sits alongside how Eva struggles to deal with the repercussions of Kevin’s actions and the very visual growth of Kevin from a devilish child who would put Damien into the shade through to cruelly intelligent teen, Tilda Swinton’s angular face perfectly suits the haunted Eva, and while the film lacks scenes of her and Franklin’s happier days (in fact the film only offers vague clues to her success as a travel writer and why the couple should have enough money to move to a mansion) its main focus is on the drama of the relationships
Lynne Ramsay, whose last film was the much acclaimed Ratcatcher (1999), displays a firm grip of the complex story, using cleverly composed scenes of empty spaces of emphasise the sadness and disconnection between the characters. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a gripping film about tormented characters, with the beautifully shot final scenes never dwelling on the tragic killings that haunt the story.
Cannes film festival reviews
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HR and Screendaily's reviews for Sleeping Beauty:
Sleeping Beauty: Cannes Review
by David Rooney
Hollywood Reporter
“You will go to sleep; you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed.” That quote from the Australian feature Sleeping Beauty is part of the job description of an emotionally detached young woman who drifts into high-end prostitution involving no actual sex. Regrettably, it could also describe the experience of watching the movie.
In 1989, Jane Campion’s first feature, Sweetie, was unveiled in the Cannes competition to a largely hostile reception. But when the knee-jerk dismissals subsided, the passionate defenders of that idiosyncratic vision of a dysfunctional family in the Australian suburbs were vindicated, establishing Campion as a distinctive new voice in international filmmaking. Campion’s name appears as a presenter on promotional materials -- though not on the titles -- of Sleeping Beauty, the debut feature from novelist Julia Leigh. But while this psychosexual twaddle will no doubt have its admirers, it seems a long shot to attract a significant following or herald the arrival of a director to watch.
The endorsement of a past Palme d’Or winner (Campion took the top Cannes prize in 1993 for The Piano) probably helped secure writer-director Leigh’s film this prestigious berth. But such prime placement can be a disservice. Cannes audiences tend to be more forgiving in sections geared to emerging talent, like Un Certain Regard or Directors Fortnight. Outside the glare of competition, even this pretentious exercise might have earned some appreciation for its rigorously cold aesthetic.
An anti-erotic fairytale, the film is a ponderous muddle of literary and cinematic allusions. Leigh acknowledges novellas by Yasunari Kawabata and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as loose starting points, but Georges Bataille also comes to mind, as do films from Belle du Jour to Eyes Wide Shut. It almost feels like one of those middle-class gutter odysseys to which Isabelle Huppert might have lent her commanding intensity a decade or so ago. (These tales of alienated Alices tumbling down the rabbit hole of extreme sex do tend to seem slightly less ludicrous in French.)
Leigh casts Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) as Lucy, a disaffected waif whose existential malaise steers her like a zombie through college classes, hookups in singles bars and thankless jobs, from office worker to waitress to medical lab test patient. Answering an advertisement seeking attractive young women, Lucy is inspected by Carla (Rachael Blake), a regal blonde matron with a client list of well-heeled old geezers. “Your vagina will be a temple,” Carla coolly informs Lucy in one of the script’s more unfortunate lines, indicating that penetration is off limits.
Outfitted in skimpy white undergarments Lucy goes to work with a team of waitresses in black bustiers and bondage gear. She pours booze at private dinner parties while guests mutter over their brandy about her creamy complexion. Carla, however, is quietly auditioning Lucy for her house specialty – the Sleeping Beauty Chamber. Knocked out with a potion, Lucy is put to bed in a room of Carla’s isolated mansion, where clients get a night alone with her.
While none of this acquires much dramatic urgency, the film’s exploration of submission, violation, objectification and depersonalization is treated with the utmost solemnity, its sterile surfaces undisturbed by even a ripple of humor. Leigh draws vague parallels between the customers’ treatment of Lucy’s passive body (tender, cruel, fumbling) and her own inadequate responses to the suffering and physical decline of her friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie). But her curiosity to know what happens during her comatose nights gets the better of her, finally breaking down her emotional wall.
There’s almost a somnambulistic quality to Browning’s performance that makes you curious to know how Lucy became so anesthetized. But Leigh’s cryptic clues are stubbornly and self-consciously elusive, leaving the character’s potential complexity untapped. Visually, too, the film remains uninvolving, its glacial pacing further slowed by exceedingly sparing camera movement, resulting in a look that's neither sensual nor unsettling.
------------------------------------
Sleeping Beauty
12 May, 2011 | By Fionnuala Halligan
Screendaily
Dir/scr: Julia Leigh. Australia. 2011. 101mins
Passive, reckless, cunning: Lucy (Emily Browning) doesn’t really care what happens to her. She has sex at the flip of a coin. She lets the stakes rise until she agrees to be drugged for money and spend the night with old men pawing her. You won’t remember a thing, she is told. “You will wake feeling profoundly restored.”
Novelist Julia Leigh’s arresting foray into feature film-making is a flawed modern-day take on ancient, disturbing fables involving sex and the subconscious - there can, of course, be “no penetration” in the sleeping chamber. But while Sleeping Beauty boasts a memorable aesthetic from a notable new filmmaker and is an ambitiously provocative piece, it is also an uneven work that will divide the critics.
An Australian film with a distinctly European aesthetic, Sleeping Beauty’s frank sexual politics feel as if they couldn’t have come from anywhere else. It is wholly devoted to its central character - an inert, sullen beauty played by newcomer Browning - and a domineering design married to static, score-less framing.
Within this eerie combination, the film can be haunting. But elsewhere, Leigh stumbles. This is a carefully controlled film, redolent with symbolism and only enhanced by a crisp sound design. It is airless, frequently lifeless. Secondary characters are clumsily captured, and “Lucy” really only works when she’s forcing the audience to fill in her seductively blank face (more emotional scenes with troubled friend Birdmann are not successful and involve a wildlife sequence which is baffling in its inclusion).
Despite this, Sleeping Beauty should travel well, and attract mixed reviews but a strong following in the art-end of the market and on the festival circuit with its literary and feminist overtones and involving sexual agenda. While wider audiences may remain elusive for this challenging piece, it is very clear from her striking debut that Julia Leigh does not need a “Jane Campion presents” label to catch the audience’s eye..... {Spoilers omitted.)
....Julia Leigh is navigating some choppy waters between the controlled metaphors of her page and the need to let some life breathe in her cinema; while she may be asleep, her Beauty still needs some air. However, young actress Browning has gone the distance for her director and together, they have delivered something here that sometimes catches your breath.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1305201865
Sleeping Beauty: Cannes Review
by David Rooney
Hollywood Reporter
“You will go to sleep; you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed.” That quote from the Australian feature Sleeping Beauty is part of the job description of an emotionally detached young woman who drifts into high-end prostitution involving no actual sex. Regrettably, it could also describe the experience of watching the movie.
In 1989, Jane Campion’s first feature, Sweetie, was unveiled in the Cannes competition to a largely hostile reception. But when the knee-jerk dismissals subsided, the passionate defenders of that idiosyncratic vision of a dysfunctional family in the Australian suburbs were vindicated, establishing Campion as a distinctive new voice in international filmmaking. Campion’s name appears as a presenter on promotional materials -- though not on the titles -- of Sleeping Beauty, the debut feature from novelist Julia Leigh. But while this psychosexual twaddle will no doubt have its admirers, it seems a long shot to attract a significant following or herald the arrival of a director to watch.
The endorsement of a past Palme d’Or winner (Campion took the top Cannes prize in 1993 for The Piano) probably helped secure writer-director Leigh’s film this prestigious berth. But such prime placement can be a disservice. Cannes audiences tend to be more forgiving in sections geared to emerging talent, like Un Certain Regard or Directors Fortnight. Outside the glare of competition, even this pretentious exercise might have earned some appreciation for its rigorously cold aesthetic.
An anti-erotic fairytale, the film is a ponderous muddle of literary and cinematic allusions. Leigh acknowledges novellas by Yasunari Kawabata and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as loose starting points, but Georges Bataille also comes to mind, as do films from Belle du Jour to Eyes Wide Shut. It almost feels like one of those middle-class gutter odysseys to which Isabelle Huppert might have lent her commanding intensity a decade or so ago. (These tales of alienated Alices tumbling down the rabbit hole of extreme sex do tend to seem slightly less ludicrous in French.)
Leigh casts Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) as Lucy, a disaffected waif whose existential malaise steers her like a zombie through college classes, hookups in singles bars and thankless jobs, from office worker to waitress to medical lab test patient. Answering an advertisement seeking attractive young women, Lucy is inspected by Carla (Rachael Blake), a regal blonde matron with a client list of well-heeled old geezers. “Your vagina will be a temple,” Carla coolly informs Lucy in one of the script’s more unfortunate lines, indicating that penetration is off limits.
Outfitted in skimpy white undergarments Lucy goes to work with a team of waitresses in black bustiers and bondage gear. She pours booze at private dinner parties while guests mutter over their brandy about her creamy complexion. Carla, however, is quietly auditioning Lucy for her house specialty – the Sleeping Beauty Chamber. Knocked out with a potion, Lucy is put to bed in a room of Carla’s isolated mansion, where clients get a night alone with her.
While none of this acquires much dramatic urgency, the film’s exploration of submission, violation, objectification and depersonalization is treated with the utmost solemnity, its sterile surfaces undisturbed by even a ripple of humor. Leigh draws vague parallels between the customers’ treatment of Lucy’s passive body (tender, cruel, fumbling) and her own inadequate responses to the suffering and physical decline of her friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie). But her curiosity to know what happens during her comatose nights gets the better of her, finally breaking down her emotional wall.
There’s almost a somnambulistic quality to Browning’s performance that makes you curious to know how Lucy became so anesthetized. But Leigh’s cryptic clues are stubbornly and self-consciously elusive, leaving the character’s potential complexity untapped. Visually, too, the film remains uninvolving, its glacial pacing further slowed by exceedingly sparing camera movement, resulting in a look that's neither sensual nor unsettling.
------------------------------------
Sleeping Beauty
12 May, 2011 | By Fionnuala Halligan
Screendaily
Dir/scr: Julia Leigh. Australia. 2011. 101mins
Passive, reckless, cunning: Lucy (Emily Browning) doesn’t really care what happens to her. She has sex at the flip of a coin. She lets the stakes rise until she agrees to be drugged for money and spend the night with old men pawing her. You won’t remember a thing, she is told. “You will wake feeling profoundly restored.”
Novelist Julia Leigh’s arresting foray into feature film-making is a flawed modern-day take on ancient, disturbing fables involving sex and the subconscious - there can, of course, be “no penetration” in the sleeping chamber. But while Sleeping Beauty boasts a memorable aesthetic from a notable new filmmaker and is an ambitiously provocative piece, it is also an uneven work that will divide the critics.
An Australian film with a distinctly European aesthetic, Sleeping Beauty’s frank sexual politics feel as if they couldn’t have come from anywhere else. It is wholly devoted to its central character - an inert, sullen beauty played by newcomer Browning - and a domineering design married to static, score-less framing.
Within this eerie combination, the film can be haunting. But elsewhere, Leigh stumbles. This is a carefully controlled film, redolent with symbolism and only enhanced by a crisp sound design. It is airless, frequently lifeless. Secondary characters are clumsily captured, and “Lucy” really only works when she’s forcing the audience to fill in her seductively blank face (more emotional scenes with troubled friend Birdmann are not successful and involve a wildlife sequence which is baffling in its inclusion).
Despite this, Sleeping Beauty should travel well, and attract mixed reviews but a strong following in the art-end of the market and on the festival circuit with its literary and feminist overtones and involving sexual agenda. While wider audiences may remain elusive for this challenging piece, it is very clear from her striking debut that Julia Leigh does not need a “Jane Campion presents” label to catch the audience’s eye..... {Spoilers omitted.)
....Julia Leigh is navigating some choppy waters between the controlled metaphors of her page and the need to let some life breathe in her cinema; while she may be asleep, her Beauty still needs some air. However, young actress Browning has gone the distance for her director and together, they have delivered something here that sometimes catches your breath.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1305201865
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sonic Youth
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Here's the first installment of "'Looks like a strong line-up this year!' until the films are finally screened".
Sleeping Beauty
By Peter Debruge
Variety
More tiresome than anything, Australian novelist Julia Leigh's debut feature, "Sleeping Beauty," concerns a self-abasing college student who doesn't distinguish among her various dead-end jobs, one of which involves being drugged into a near-coma and manhandled by strangers. Leigh's arty (not to be confused with artistic) treatment of such provocative subject matter derives from her own 2008 Black List-blessed screenplay, though the film's frustratingly elliptical style and lack of character insight give it a distinctly first-draft feel. Racy subject and ample nudity should land this Jane Campion-endorsed production some decent fest exposure before rubbing ratings boards wrong around the world.
Whereas classical Hollywood cinema relies on the so-called "goal-oriented protagonist," too many recent independent pics favor the opposite extreme, building laconic, momentum-free narratives around disaffected, near-catatonic young people. Leigh elevates this uncompelling personality type to existential levels, suggesting a character so haunted by death she hardly allows herself to feel anything in life. By extension, we hardly feel anything either, even as the film lapses into a series of ostensibly shocking physical violations.
"Sleeping Beauty" stars former child actress Emily Browning, making the common mistake of erring too far toward the outre when trying to prove she's grown up enough to handle adult roles. Browning plays Lucy, who divides her time between brain-numbing jobs, including collating copies, cleaning tables at a restaurant and performing strange medical tests for money. The film opens with an unsettling scene from the latter gig, in which Lucy nearly gags as she swallows a long tube with a balloon at the end.
Technically, no matter what the job, someone is "using" Lucy -- a subtext that semi-excuses her willingness to take a high-paying gig as a lingerie waitress at a kinky dinner party -- though it's telling that we are never more uncomfortable than during that first balloon-experiment scene. What is Lucy's motive for accepting these arduous assignments? Is she a masochist? Does she need the money? (Coming home from the lingerie job, she burns some of her earnings. But why?)
In press notes provided to Cannes journalists, Leigh admits being inspired by two novellas, Yasunari Kawabata's "The House of Sleeping Beauties" and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," which both feature brothels where men pay to lie down beside naked, narcotized young women. The classic fairy tale also factors, but only indirectly, as seen through certain visual details such as poison berries, Lucy's doll-like appearance, etc.
But the question of why a girl would agree to such a job (answer: for money) isn't nearly so interesting as what kind of men require such unconventional company. Just one scene in this perplexingly oblique feature addresses that mystery, as a sallow old customer launches into a soporific monologue about his ex-wife. If Lucy weren't already out cold, she would be by the end of this man's speech -- just one of many scenes in which the most compelling detail is Annie Beauchamp's production design.
Otherwise, "Sleeping Beauty" is maddeningly elliptical, depriving auds of virtually any of the details they need to understand, much less relate to the character. It's fair to call Browning brave for taking on this role, but she's too wooden and inexpressive here to invite us into Lucy's interior space. Leigh supplies a few clues as to Lucy's private life -- a tense phone call with her mother, dreary visits to terminally ill friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie) and a sexually charged nightclub encounter -- but it's not enough from which to extrapolate a meaningful character.
And so we find ourselves caught in a cycle of repetitive scenes, typically contained within a single, nearly static shot, as Leigh alternates vignettes among Lucy's various jobs. Degradation and empowerment mix as the character sells access to her limp, cadaver-like body, calling to mind Browning's recent turn in Zack Snyder's fetish extravaganza "Sucker Punch." But Leigh's style is hyper-restrained by contrast, paring back music in favor of sound design that emphasizes the vacuousness of any given moment.
For those eager to tease out what Leigh's conceptual exercise is about, the key no doubt lies in Lucy's relation to her own mortality, with each descent into sleep resembling a death of sorts. So it comes as no surprise that witnessing real death is the only occurrence that provokes an emotional reaction from the character, ultimately bringing her screaming back into the world a reborn beauty.
Sleeping Beauty
By Peter Debruge
Variety
More tiresome than anything, Australian novelist Julia Leigh's debut feature, "Sleeping Beauty," concerns a self-abasing college student who doesn't distinguish among her various dead-end jobs, one of which involves being drugged into a near-coma and manhandled by strangers. Leigh's arty (not to be confused with artistic) treatment of such provocative subject matter derives from her own 2008 Black List-blessed screenplay, though the film's frustratingly elliptical style and lack of character insight give it a distinctly first-draft feel. Racy subject and ample nudity should land this Jane Campion-endorsed production some decent fest exposure before rubbing ratings boards wrong around the world.
Whereas classical Hollywood cinema relies on the so-called "goal-oriented protagonist," too many recent independent pics favor the opposite extreme, building laconic, momentum-free narratives around disaffected, near-catatonic young people. Leigh elevates this uncompelling personality type to existential levels, suggesting a character so haunted by death she hardly allows herself to feel anything in life. By extension, we hardly feel anything either, even as the film lapses into a series of ostensibly shocking physical violations.
"Sleeping Beauty" stars former child actress Emily Browning, making the common mistake of erring too far toward the outre when trying to prove she's grown up enough to handle adult roles. Browning plays Lucy, who divides her time between brain-numbing jobs, including collating copies, cleaning tables at a restaurant and performing strange medical tests for money. The film opens with an unsettling scene from the latter gig, in which Lucy nearly gags as she swallows a long tube with a balloon at the end.
Technically, no matter what the job, someone is "using" Lucy -- a subtext that semi-excuses her willingness to take a high-paying gig as a lingerie waitress at a kinky dinner party -- though it's telling that we are never more uncomfortable than during that first balloon-experiment scene. What is Lucy's motive for accepting these arduous assignments? Is she a masochist? Does she need the money? (Coming home from the lingerie job, she burns some of her earnings. But why?)
In press notes provided to Cannes journalists, Leigh admits being inspired by two novellas, Yasunari Kawabata's "The House of Sleeping Beauties" and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," which both feature brothels where men pay to lie down beside naked, narcotized young women. The classic fairy tale also factors, but only indirectly, as seen through certain visual details such as poison berries, Lucy's doll-like appearance, etc.
But the question of why a girl would agree to such a job (answer: for money) isn't nearly so interesting as what kind of men require such unconventional company. Just one scene in this perplexingly oblique feature addresses that mystery, as a sallow old customer launches into a soporific monologue about his ex-wife. If Lucy weren't already out cold, she would be by the end of this man's speech -- just one of many scenes in which the most compelling detail is Annie Beauchamp's production design.
Otherwise, "Sleeping Beauty" is maddeningly elliptical, depriving auds of virtually any of the details they need to understand, much less relate to the character. It's fair to call Browning brave for taking on this role, but she's too wooden and inexpressive here to invite us into Lucy's interior space. Leigh supplies a few clues as to Lucy's private life -- a tense phone call with her mother, dreary visits to terminally ill friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie) and a sexually charged nightclub encounter -- but it's not enough from which to extrapolate a meaningful character.
And so we find ourselves caught in a cycle of repetitive scenes, typically contained within a single, nearly static shot, as Leigh alternates vignettes among Lucy's various jobs. Degradation and empowerment mix as the character sells access to her limp, cadaver-like body, calling to mind Browning's recent turn in Zack Snyder's fetish extravaganza "Sucker Punch." But Leigh's style is hyper-restrained by contrast, paring back music in favor of sound design that emphasizes the vacuousness of any given moment.
For those eager to tease out what Leigh's conceptual exercise is about, the key no doubt lies in Lucy's relation to her own mortality, with each descent into sleep resembling a death of sorts. So it comes as no surprise that witnessing real death is the only occurrence that provokes an emotional reaction from the character, ultimately bringing her screaming back into the world a reborn beauty.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler