Das Haus der schlafenden Schönen

This is one of three films I know of about this particular subject-- brothels that cater to older men, allowing them to sleep next to, but not actually penetrate, beautiful young girls who have been willingly drugged to sleep. These movies are not so much based on any real-life perversion (although I wouldn't want to bet that SOMEBODY out there doesn't have this particular fetish), but they rather have much more literary origins in the form of a Japanese novel. There was an earlier Japanese version of this novel called "The Room" made by the notorious "pink" director of colorfully titled movies like "Lolita Vibrator Torture". I haven't seen "The Room", but it's rather notorious because the director chose to give a cameo role to a REAL-LIFE murderer/cannibal (a Japanese guy who killed and partially ate a Dutch co-ed in Paris, but was unaccountably released from a French asylum to become a ghoulish, half-assed celebrity in Japan). Obviously, THAT really overshadowed the movie, which has never really received an international release.

More recently there was a 2011 English-language movie called "Sleeping Beauty" with Emily Browning, which is perhaps more accessible than this German movie since it is told from the point of a view of a beautiful young girl who works at this kind of brothel (it was also directed by a woman if that matters). This earlier movie lacks the nicest ass, I mean, nicest asset of the later movie in the form of Emily Browning, but it is generally more successful. As beautiful as Browning is and as much as I admire for being in such a movie, Maxmillian Schell is obviously a more experienced actor and really carries this German movie as a lonely morose widower who has lost his wife and daughter in an accident, but finds a strange solipsistic solace in a "house of sleeping beauties" and develops an interesting relationship with the house madame (Angela Winkler).

It's not a perfect movie by any means. Even though it's German, it seems to be rather badly dubbed into German and it is given to strange voice-overs by minor characters (like the old man's maid). It has a lot of female nudity, but no real sex, so I can see why many would find it boring. But at times it achieves a kind of sweet, morose poetry, and it certainly achieves an aura of general weirdness. It's worth checking out, as is the slightly inferior, but much more accessible "Sleeping Beauty".

Leading American film critics whose voices are listened to, and, worse, whose opinions are believed, have condemned "Das Haus Der Schlafenden Schönen" (2000), directed by Vadim Glowna, as a filthy concoction even repugnant for dirty little old men.

In reality, the movie follows exactly the intentions of the director (whose statements can be read, if one can read, in the specials of the one and only international DVD version existing). The movie is about the sadness and emptiness of old age, the confrontation of sexual lust with the semiotic world of substitutes, a movie about a transition on whose one end is, in the case of the main character Edmond, played by Glowna himself, the sum of a still ongoing successful life, and on whose other end there is the eternal relapse into silence. The movie plays mainly in a strange kind of brothel, where men can go and are only allowed to watch the beautiful sleeping young womens' bodies. Any communication is excluded, because the girls have been heavily sedated by the strange "Puffmutter", played by the great German star Angela Winkler. Every attempt at waking the girls up - as well as to speak to them when they are met on the street - is "against the law of this house". People who see filthiness in these scenes, when the old man fondles the young unspent bodies, are incapable of understanding that between a wake and a sleeping person there is a con-textural abyss as big as between live and death. And this is said explicitly in the movie. But one could know it from Gotthard Gunther's commentary to the famous scene where Alice stands before the Red King who is sleeping in the grass. How loud Alice cries, there is no way across the con-texture border to the king and vice versa. The same is true for Edmond and the young women. Nothing else is the "Law of the House". It is not a rule, the Madam calls it purposely law, because is it independent of human conventions. We also know that the sleep is the little brother of Death. Just in the time of the movie, the old man stands still on his side of the reality of life, but he knows, soon, he will transgress this border. His transition leads him to transgress. The Art-Nouveau-house is his terminal station. He knows that long before he is going to see what will actually happen to him. However, in this transitional state, lying at the edge of the bed of the young women, the con-texture border between life and death, between awake and sleeping person, between old man and young woman, between the two sexes, he is sentenced to be a mere observer. He is not allowed to participate. The same Edmond is doing when we see him in the beginning of the movie standing at the window of his big industry building: He looks down into the night, where the people and the circulation are busy. He stands there and observes. He does not walk around but uses his car and the chauffeur. It turns out that it is exactly this state of observer which characterizes Edmond's phase of transition. Death is not the end of life, but of observation.

I saw this movie tonight at a preview and was merely bored with it. "The House of sleeping beauties" is a German remake of the Japanese movie "Nemureru bijo" and the third film adaption of the book by Yasunari Kawabata. The story follows a man in his sixties, who lost his wife and daughter. Depressed by this loss, he's introduced to a very special woman who offers him a night with a beautiful girl. The tricky thing is, the girl is sleeping and can not be awaken.

I do not neglect that this story (and film) have a great sense of philosophy, but Vadir Glowna (who's the leading actor, too) does not manage to create an intensive atmosphere. The bad acting of every actor - excluding Schell maybe - leads to a very poor credibility of the characters. Even good lines are poorly recited, without passion and feeling.

What's left to say is, that you can argue, if you like Kawabata's story or not - anyway, Glowna's film does not pay Kawabata tribute.

I disagree with the review that justified fondling bodies of women who are asleep. This film is very problematic and that's why it received the criticism it did. It was basically an attempt to explain away and justify his perversion.