The Sleeping Beauty

Directed by Catherine Breillat

(Not rated)

***

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This fairly tale is “not for children,” said V.A. Musetto in the New York Post. Created by the provocative French director Catherine Breillat, it not only contains sex and subtitles, but “presents childhood as a time of terror.” Mostly, the film consists of the “gorgeously rendered” dreams of a 6-year-old girl who’s been cast into a 100-year slumber to escape a curse that destined her to die at age 16. “It’s clear what Breillat is trying to do in the abstract,” said Noel Murray in the A.V. Club. As the film’s young heroine outwits an ogre, falls for a farmboy who betrays her, and befriends a Gypsy girl, her dreams are helping her grow into womanhood. Yet “the movie doesn’t hang together as a story.” Certainly, the film “loses some of its magic” when the girl awakens in the contemporary world, at age 16, said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. But if The Sleeping Beauty isn’t Breillat’s boldest exploration of a woman’s coming-of-age, it “throws off a burnished fairy-tale glow all the way through.”