Cinefantastique Online

Maria Burghardt, one of the occupants of the HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES

BBC America is presently running — every hour on the hour, it sometimes seems — a documentary called MY FAKE BABY. In it, women who have lost a child through death or legal wrangling, or who are incapable of having children to begin with, spend great sums of cash to purchase spooky, exquisitely detailed baby dolls. These women then dress the mannequins up in lavish wardrobes and push them around in prams through parks and shopping malls, becoming eternal mothers to never-aging offspring.

I haven’t raised this point on a mere whim. I do it to nip in the bud any impulse you may subsequently have to think that the inclination to seek solace through objectification is solely a male prerogative.

Some guys have all the luck: Edmond (Vadim Glowna) settles in for the night.

So here we have Edmond (Vadim Glowna, who also wrote and directed), a 60 year-old man who still mourns the loss of his wife and daughter in a horrific auto accident, and who now is staring down the maw of his own mortality. A sympathetic friend (Maximilian Schell) steers him to a townhouse where, for a not inconsiderable fee, a man can spend the night with a naked woman immersed in a deep, uninterruptible sleep, and do pretty much what he wishes with her. Edmond rapidly becomes hooked on the service, confessing between fondles his fears and desires to the unconscious beauties, while struggling to ignore the cryptic behavior of the house’s madam (the superbly unsettling Angela Winkler), not to mention the station wagon that occasionally pulls into the building’s alleyway to receive large, bundled parcels.

Another Beauty.

Not really a horror film, not an out-and-out exercise in erotica, HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES winds up being a carefully nuanced examination of the intersection between sex and death, and the lengths to which we as humans will go to seek a safe enough environ, however dubious, to unburden our souls. Glowna works some subtly morbid wit into the story (the madam keeps pitching the different personalities of her stock — women, remember, who cannot be roused — and sonuvabitch if she doesn’t turn out to be right), and manages a yearning kind of eroticism in how Edmond caresses and exploits his bedmates (even though one woman has a pubic thatch so epic that it looks like a small rodent has taken nest in her crotch). If, eventually, Edmond’s soliloquies become oppressive — he has something like four or five extended ones — there’s compensation in a drama that touches at human vulnerabilities that often, otherwise go unexamined. Dark, affecting (and, in its way, very, very German), HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES succeeds in using a fantastic idea to give us a glimpse into a very real, emotional journey.

HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES (First Run Features, 2007; 99 mins.) Directed by Vadim Glowna. Cast: Vadim Glowna, Angela Winkler, Maximilian Schell, Mona Glass.