House of the Sleeping Beauties
Though far from perfect, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen (2008) deserved much better than the moralistic and pejorative reviews that awaited its premiere at the Quad Cinema last winter. Written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also starred as Edmond, the film featured Angela Winkler as the Madame and Maximilian Schell as Edmond's friend Kogi. 
Glowna, best known for Desperado City (1981) and Nothing Left to Lose (1983), adapted the script from a 1961 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Yasunari's real-life suicide figures into the tale of unmitigated grief and the inescapability of dreams, for, haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter who have died in a crash fifteen years earlier, Edmond is a lonely man in modern day Berlin with nothing left to live for. Nothing, that is, until his friend Kogi tells him of a secret brothel where elderly men can stay all night with heavily-sedated girls who will not awake no matter what you do to them (the clients are presumed impotent by the Madame). Vadim Rizov, writing for the 
Village Voice on November 11, 2008, called the film "laughably somber" and "one of the year's worst releases." Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times, taking the morality up a notch, wrote on November 14, 2008 that an "odor of fusty smut" clings to this "clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence," and that its "whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore." And Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 9, 2009, complained "it's discouraging to see a movie where the women sleep through everything. They don't even have the courtesy to wake up and claim to have a headache." He continued, condescendingly suggesting that House of the Sleeping Beauties "offends not only civilized members of both sexes, 
but even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness." He then states that "obvious questions arise" in the film, such as how does the Madame "find the women? Who are they? Why do they seem to sleep peacefully instead of as if they are drugged? How do they keep their hair and makeup impeccable?" Some points raised by these reviews (and others) were well taken, and Edmond's soliloquies are pretentious and poorly written and the film is filled, in unexpected places, with bizarre religious imagery. But as for the film's implied necrophilia, its unsettled nature, its mysteries, its shortcomings, its matter of fact attitude toward the death machine of the sex trade (for which both prostitute and john are disposable), and its utter disregard for modern middle-class morality--they make it all the more worth watching. The underlying message of the reviews last winter seems to be that there is nothing erotic or nice or proper about severely-drugged girls or creepy men who pay top dollar to fondle them in their sleep. What is the world coming to?
Though far from perfect, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen (2008) deserved much better than the moralistic and pejorative reviews that awaited its premiere at the Quad Cinema last winter. Written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also starred as Edmond, the film featured Angela Winkler as the Madame and Maximilian Schell as Edmond's friend Kogi. 
Glowna, best known for Desperado City (1981) and Nothing Left to Lose (1983), adapted the script from a 1961 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Yasunari's real-life suicide figures into the tale of unmitigated grief and the inescapability of dreams, for, haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter who have died in a crash fifteen years earlier, Edmond is a lonely man in modern day Berlin with nothing left to live for. Nothing, that is, until his friend Kogi tells him of a secret brothel where elderly men can stay all night with heavily-sedated girls who will not awake no matter what you do to them (the clients are presumed impotent by the Madame). Vadim Rizov, writing for the 
Village Voice on November 11, 2008, called the film "laughably somber" and "one of the year's worst releases." Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times, taking the morality up a notch, wrote on November 14, 2008 that an "odor of fusty smut" clings to this "clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence," and that its "whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore." And Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 9, 2009, complained "it's discouraging to see a movie where the women sleep through everything. They don't even have the courtesy to wake up and claim to have a headache." He continued, condescendingly suggesting that House of the Sleeping Beauties "offends not only civilized members of both sexes, 
but even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness." He then states that "obvious questions arise" in the film, such as how does the Madame "find the women? Who are they? Why do they seem to sleep peacefully instead of as if they are drugged? How do they keep their hair and makeup impeccable?" Some points raised by these reviews (and others) were well taken, and Edmond's soliloquies are pretentious and poorly written and the film is filled, in unexpected places, with bizarre religious imagery. But as for the film's implied necrophilia, its unsettled nature, its mysteries, its shortcomings, its matter of fact attitude toward the death machine of the sex trade (for which both prostitute and john are disposable), and its utter disregard for modern middle-class morality--they make it all the more worth watching. The underlying message of the reviews last winter seems to be that there is nothing erotic or nice or proper about severely-drugged girls or creepy men who pay top dollar to fondle them in their sleep. What is the world coming to?
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