![]() ![]() But the carriage is waylaid by bandits, and Anastasia is rescued by her fellow passenger, a gypsy and fellow tomboy (Luna Charpentier), who takes her into her frolicsome, celebratory, imagination-fueled world before sending her off once again to seek Peter, this time riding a doe and headed for snowy plains. She lands first in a kingdom run by little people and ruled by an albino-child king and queen, whom she befriends and who send her off in a carriage to a place where Peter may have been spotted. When Peter leaves her in pursuit of his ethereal queen, Anastasia is once again borne away by the dream train, embarking on a journey to find her beloved Peter wherever he has gone. This equal, mutually fulfilling relationship ends when Peter is tempted away, in some beautifully shot sequences (courtesy Denis Lenoir, who also shot Olivier Assayas's Carlos and works wonders here on digital video the images are like illustrated plates from some deluxe antique children's book), by the Snow Queen (Romane Portail)-an idealized vision of coolly perfect, brittle femininity that appears to Peter, not coincidentally, as puberty overtakes him and begins to beckon him away from Anastasia. A magical steam train is her first mode of transport, and it brings her to a cottage in the woods, where Anastasia is adopted by a tough but kind matriarch and her new older brother, Peter (Kérian Mayan), who becomes her beloved platonic playmate. (The obligatory hand prick comes from a stick being used to hold her hair in perfect place.) After that, she embarks upon her 100-year sleep, and we follow along as, like Alice going down the rabbit hole, she advances into a dream world. Cut to Anastasia, age six (Carla Besnaïnou) she's a tomboy who wants to be a knight instead of a girl stuck wearing dresses, and her inevitable accident comes when she too forcefully, physically resists being cast among other tutu-wearing girly-girls in a pageant. ![]() The film opens on the birth of the princess Anastasia (the princess being born to Russian royalty in this rendition) and her curse to an early death by an evil old fairy (Rosine Favey), with the belated intervention of three younger, more flighty fairy protectors, who reduce her death sentence to a mere accident at age six that will put her to sleep-and, a most important detail, allow her to dream-for 100 years. Seen that way, the fairy tale quality is something that the sharp, intense mind of Breillat has actually brought to all of her work (each of her films could be considered a "fairy tale for adults"), and it is almost a self-evident move for her to give us her own Sleeping Beauty, the entirety of which revisits the pastoral yet disquieting atmosphere of that Anatomy of Hell reprieve and is a gorgeous, sometimes amazing, and strangely moving exploration and defamiliarization of one of our most well-known storybook tales. They are instead, of course, barely-sublimated expressions of desires and fears we don't want to think about children having, all extra-ripe for the most discomfitingly Freudian interpretations. The powerful form and imagery of that scene-its heightened, gruesome yet transfixing, near-mythologically significant content the dreamy, impossible beauty of its sunlit verdancy-resemble those of fairy tales, which nobody but the most naive could possibly believe are innocuous, not even the Disney versions. In this flashback-all bright, open nature and sunshine contrasting with yet connected to the rest of Anatomy of Hell's stark, graphic sexual explorations-the little boy who will become the male half of the film's (very) adult couple smashes a newly hatched baby bird, a traumatic sight that he forever after associates with the female sex organs. In French director Catherine Breillat's most extreme, disturbing film, 2004's Anatomy of Hell, there is a brief flashback scene that offers a sort of presentiment of her current obsession with the cinematic retelling of fairy tales (2010's Bluebeard and, now, The Sleeping Beauty). ![]()
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