Metacritic reviews

Following 2009's "Bluebeard," French filmmaker Catherine Breillat continues her unique and psychologically, erotically daring deconstruction of classic fairy tales and the female condition.

Breillat manages to give us a lush, quiet spectacle with The Sleeping Beauty.

It's clear what Breillat is trying to do here in the abstract - and The Sleeping Beauty is never less than gorgeous to look at - but the movie doesn't hang together as a story, and "stories" are what these fairy tales are meant to deliver.

This film is no fairy tale for children. Not only does it contain nudity and sex, both straight and lesbian, but it also presents childhood as a time of terror.

Though The Sleeping Beauty ends ambiguously, it remains consistent with the logic that Breillat has laid out: A girl's childhood and adolescence are often culturally sanctioned confinements. But the prisoners aren't always victims; the jails can be escaped through the courage to "go alone into the world."

The pleasures of Ms. Breillat's work are its commitment and seriousness and its raw, sometimes very funny perversity: she's lets everything hang out, without apologies.

Breillat, seemingly inspired as much by C.S. Lewis and Hans Christian Andersen as by original author Charles Perrault, doesn't really make the most of her subversive premise.

The Sleeping Beauty lacks either the dramatic intensity or the sexual frankness that drew attention to her previous films "Fat Girl" and "The Last Mistress."

Breillat, as always, goes her own way, but her impressionistic scenes barely cohere, even at this brief running time.

Judging from The Sleeping Beauty, and the previous "Bluebeard," the provocations stop with the choice of the material, as the tone and style of these films are jarringly well-behaved.