Catherine Breillat

Guest Review: The Sleeping Beauty - directed by Catherine Breillat by Emilie Spiegel

There was no way I wasn’t going to love Catherine Breillat’s latest film, The Sleeping Beauty (La belle endormie). It covers all my bases: female-centric (check), arty and lusciously imagined (check), and of course, French. I love everything I’ve ever seen from Breillat, and her current offering fits in nicely within her oeuvre of sex-positive feminist provocation (with a particular fascination towards youth and adolescence). Her works maintain a poignant paradox that so many films about young people cannot manage; the young heroine in the Breillat imaginary is naïve, yet wise, curious, yet stubborn, innocent, yet awakened. In the case of Th...