A Film Canon

The Australian New Wave of the late 70s and early 80s exhibited a tension between languorous stylistic experimentation and a kind of stylistic pragmatism, a reproachfully 'sincere' disregard for style - and the victory of the latter is the only way to explain the middling critical response to Julia Leigh's extraordinary debut feature. Even the most idiosyncratic contemporary Australian films tend to anchor their stylistic signature in an insistent, vernacular drawl, whereas Leigh not only eschews this, but imbues every utterance with a ceremonial quality that's palpably insincere, or at least artificial. The narrative is elliptical and oblique, telling the story of Lucy (Emily Browning), a troubled university student who drifts into lingerie waitressing, and from there to a fetishistic business, in which men pay her to take a sleeping pill for five hours, during which they're allowed to do anything to her that's not harmful or penetrative. It'd be too crude to reduce such an elusive film to an allegory for the Sydney property crisis, but Lucy's movement from student-house to boutique apartment could only be mapped out in this way in a mileu in which private property had become uncanny, gothic and even aristocratic - relegated, with the help of a spectrum of Australian-English accents, to an almost colonial distance, in a neo-noir tour of Sydney's heritage houses, where most of the sex acts take place. That said, Sydney is largely abstracted, as Leigh's taste for tight, medium-shots, and the virtual absence of music, or even diegetic sound, makes every space feel like an interior, and imbues every composition with the immaculate interior design of the houses themselves. This tends to be drawn from Oriental sources, creating a hushed floating world, or a digital painting, that places it alongside the greatest films about prostitution, most notably American Gigolo. At the same time, Lucy is transformed into a porcelain edifice, in which, as her madam (Rachael Blake) reminds her, her vagina is her "temple"; or, rather, in which the temporal space within her vagina simply becomes continuous with the private spaces within which she and her vagina are paraded. With the help of an analogy between the labia and mouth, between temple and temple, these private spaces become the real erotic object, the endoscopic trajectory from dinner table to double bed, or the whole etiquette of bourgeois, private speech that's endlessly rehearsed and denatured. At the same time, Leigh's fade-outs between scenes, and minimal cutting within them, opens up a hallucinatory, private time - or even a privatized time, as the pervasive connection between drugs and money might suggest, fused into a tipsy "kind of grace". From this perspective, and as a house-bound, suicidal friend of Lucy's suggests, the ultimate erotic fantasy of the film is not merely sleeping or waking up in your own bed, but having the luxury to die in your own bed; or, more radically, the luxury of a private space from which to construct fantasy at all, a dream of the dreamless space required for dreaming to occur.