LA BELLE ENDORMIE

23/30

La Belle Endormie is, following Breillats general style, a divergent representation of Sleeping Beauty. Overflowing with surreal images, controverse interpretations and despite Breillat’s choice to star young actress Carla Bresninou as Sleeping Beauty, highly sensual.

Although it is La Belle Endormie, the vast majority of the plot follows Hans Christian Andersen’s famous storytale “The Snow Queen”.

Furthermore Breillat doesn’t merely stop at this, for  not only is the story of the Snow Queen buried within that of Sleeping Beauty but, in order to interlink both, Andersen’s fairytale is further developed and transported from a childhood tale to that of a young adolescent discovering her sexuality.

The film takes a well known fairytale in which the weak role of the feminine figure is evident and transforms it into a story in which both gender and sexuality are questioned and explored.

Throughout the film the camera movement is slight, predominantly consisting on horizontal pans and certain interestingly angled shots. The colors are vibrant and successfully recreate the fairytale world in which the film takes place without fully distancing it from the contemporary subjects it presents. Nevertheless the special effects seem rather exaggerated in some cases and make the film over whimsical.

It is not your well known Sleeping Beauty, but a far more tangible and current interpretation, with a subplot of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen which further develops making the film a highly suggestive and surreal Sleeping Beauty.

06:09:2010