Review: House of the Sleeping Beauties

In a gloomy urban German nowhereland, morose 60-something Edmond (Vadim Glowna) walks the streets alone, the surrounding prison-bar railings and angular staircases framing his solitary stroll as well as mirroring his feelings of being trapped by his past. Did his wife and daughter die accidentally in a car crash or was it suicide, he wonders, a depressing, unshakable fixation that spurs an old friend of his, Kogi (Maximilian Schell), to recommend that he visit a clandestine establishment where elder gentlemen can sleep alongside slumbering young women.

These heavily sedated sleeping beauties cannot be awakened nor do they remember their nocturnal rendezvous, a situation that hints at deviant sex but, for Edmond, merely provides an opportunity to freely talk about love, life, transience, his deceased spouse and child, and his mother, all topics which he expounds upon while lying naked next to his comatose companions. Is, as he wonders, the mysterious proprietor of this business, Madame (Angela Winkler), the "bringer of death"? Are the dead bodies of certain girls being surreptitiously removed from the premises in the back of a car? Is Kogi somehow mixed up in Madame's strange enterprise, which cautions clients against forming emotional attachments and forbids them outright from following the ladies during the day?

Such questions flow throughout House of the Sleeping Beauties, and give Edmond much food for thought in-between his regular bouts of sucking on his bedmates' exposed nipples. Based on an acclaimed novella by Yasunari Kawabata, Glowna's film purposefully strives for metaphor, with more recurring signifiers than actual characters and an ethereal, unreal atmosphere that announces the proceedings as far removed from gritty reality. If ever there was a paradigm of insufferable European art-house pretentiousness, this is it, a ponderous, pompous mélange of Oedipal issues, death anxiety, and taboo eroticism that plays like a parody of every foreign import that arrived stateside during the '60s and '70s. Glowna means to investigate and articulate, with poetic obliqueness, the tumultuous feelings that accompany aging, while at the same time generate dramatic tension through rote thriller mechanics that come to the fore when it becomes clear that Madame has potentially sinister ulterior motives in offering such services to the city's male senior citizens and, later, when Edmond tracks one of the girls after randomly happening upon her in the street.

Excitement of any variety, however, is virtually absent from this agonizingly sluggish endeavor, which aims to deliver chilly intellectual and erotic thrills from an avalanche of narrated interior monologues by everyone who appears on screen - save, that is, for the sleeping beauties themselves, who are meant to be taken not as actual human beings but, instead, as merely representative figures. Edmond's endless spoken and unspoken ruminations on his grief, loneliness, and mother (cue insert shots of grainy black-and-white portrait photos of the old lady) comprise the majority of House of the Sleeping Beauties' story, with his laments about regret, desire, the fragility of life and the finality of death serving as attempts to combat the silence and darkness of the (literal and figurative) night. Alas, his thoughts on these portentous subjects are devoid of any delicacy or insightfulness - sample, to one snoozing girl: "You smell of milk. It is the milky scent of a child that is still weaning." - and soon come to sound like third-rate versions of the pontifications espoused by Wings of Desire's angels. Meanwhile, the peripheral characters' thoughts, similarly conveyed both verbally and internally, merely elucidate that Edmond doesn't have a monopoly on dreary solitude and longing.

If the film is weighed down by its incessant musings, it's virtually undone by symbolism, which Glowna so often falls back upon that it negates any visible traces of meaningful, moving humanity from his narrative. Ravens soaring across gray skies, fuzzy snapshots of the dead, flowing water, and statues of the Virgin Mary and Pegasus are simply some of the chronic emblems that drag House of the Sleeping Beauties into the realm of the leadenly allegorical, their appearances serving not to augment the plot's import but merely to highlight Glowna's predilection for affectation. This reaches its excruciating apex during the film's climax, during which the thematically charged sight of elderly Glowna closely commingling with young, unclothed women is saddled with blunt religious significance. Yet even more than his final angelic tableau, it's the director's refusal to address his tale's central, glaring pedophilic-rape dynamic - either overtly or subtly, humorously or solemnly - that finally cements the impression that the story isn't a serious stab at grappling with eternal, inevitable questions so much as a self-serious opportunity for the director/star to caress nubile female flesh.