Directed by: Ken Ninomiya
Starring: Yuki Sakurai, Issey Takahashi, Nino Furuhata, Ippei Sasaki, Junko Abe
The Film: Aki moves to Tokyo with big dreams of becoming an actress. There she meets a man named Kaito who operates the small theater AURORA where magic shows are performed for small crowds, and Aki begins working as the magician’s assistant in exchange for room and board. 10 years pass and with the entertainment industry favoring younger actress, the chances of Aki landing a career launching role grow slimmer and slimmer as she nears her 30th birthday. Her spirit begins to fade and the boundary between reality and fantasy becomes blurred. Lost in confusion and questioning her very existence, Aki struggles to make meaning of her life. Can she wake from this cold nightmare?
Director Ken Ninomiya originally made The Limit of Sleeping Beauty as a medium length independent film, but when producers approached him and asked for a full length feature, he said, “Sure, why not?” With a few character rewrites and most likely some added music tracks, The Limit of Sleeping Beauty has been pushed to 89 minutes…and pushed it feels. Without knowing exactly how the original ran or how Japanese record label King Records influenced the final cut, The Limit of Sleeping Beauty may end up testing the limits of those looking for anything consistently coherent in either story or tone.
Aki (Yuki Sakurai) has had her sights set on becoming an actress since was a little girl and followed her dreams to Tokyo where she hoped to become a star. Aki begins working as a magician’s assistant in a small theater named AURORA where she’s fallen for the manager, Kaito (Issey Takahashi). Before she knows it, 10 years have passed and she has yet to land a breakout role. When the stars finally start aligning and Aki gets cast as the lead actress in a famous director’s upcoming work, tragedy strikes in her personal life and Aki’s world begins to fall apart.
As hallucinations become her reality, Aki becomes lost in her own mind where she meets a man dressed as a clown named Butch (Nino Furuhata). Aki and Butch reflect on the mysteries of life in various crisis moments, and Butch attempts to steer Aki down a particular path that she is resistant to accept. Butch and Aki represent warring aspects of her conflicting psychological state of mind, and she must piece together her sanity before its lost forever.
With the film being primarily a story about a young woman who dreamed of stardom becoming disillusioned and eventually finding herself wrestling to find meaning in a life potentially misspent, there is not a whole lot of new ground covered in The Limit of Sleeping Beauty. On a fundamental level, it’s a fairly worn out formula. So, the film primarily aims to appeal to the senses in a variety of regards. From its booming electro-pop soundtrack, flashy editing techniques and saturated color pallet, to its over-the-top sex scenes and dance club interludes, The Limit of Sleeping Beauty is a classic case of style over substance that often feels like a prolonged music video.
The choice of music used in The Limit of Sleeping Beauty will be hit or miss based on individual viewer tastes and could potentially be a deal breaker in the overall enjoyment of this ride of sensual pleasures. Boasting the theme song “Hummingbird” by a powerful Sia-esque vocalist, Kyla La Grange, one has to wonder whether the music is there more as a vehicle for selling soundtracks than as a carefully selected and well suited score. Also, there is a tune in the film that sounds almost identical to the opening theme for Netflix’s Stranger Things, which is awesome, but every time it showed up I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Isn’t this the Stranger Things theme song?”
That being said, The Limit of Sleeping Beauty is a very colorful production, using nearly every color of LED to light its dark interiors. This gives the film the right fantasy vibe its looking for in order to tell this dark fairy tale gone awry. The production team made great use of its modest $300,000 budget, making use of minimal exteriors and artfully decorated sets consisting of pretty much random junk. This helped add to the sense of claustrophobia and confusion that Aki experiences while lost inside her own mind.
Consistent with the plot of the film, lead actress Yuki Sakurai (Tag) hasn’t had much experience as the lead actress in many movies herself. While her performance of Aki is commendable, she is still very much a developing actress and doesn’t quite deliver in the films bigger moments. Her alter ego and bald-headed clown counterpart, Butch, is mildly entertaining and helps add to the bizzarro world in which the film mostly inhabits. As for Aki’s love interest, her relationship to Kaito is extremely thin feels like one of the script’s rewrites for its extended format, and it turns out to actually be the case. The original mid-length feature of The Limit of Sleeping Beauty focused on a relationship between Aki and her father, but the producers favored going the love interest route apparently to appeal to a younger and potentially wider audience. This whole reworking of the central relationship feels clunky and minimally developed.
The Limit of Sleeping Beauty has some very interesting story ideas based around the original concept of exploring the psychological state of a sleeping princess, or in the film’s case– a young woman who has not yet realized (and may never) her dream. When Aki reaches her limit from all the rejection, self doubt, and grief she experienes in her struggle, she finds herself in desperation mode and enters the dark underworld of show business contracts and dealings. There is an attempt to delve into modern scandal territory that reflects the outrage felt in the aftermath of the Me Too movement as well but it comes off as misguided and done in poor taste.
There were a few too many moments of cringe for me while watching The Limit of Sleeping Beauty that really degraded the overall viewing experience. Whether it was the odd dance numbers that attempted to show Aki in a state of either confusion or jubilation, the awkwardly staged and chemistry-lacking sex scenes, or the sheer lack of an engaging story, The Limit of Sleeping Beauty pushed me to my limits by its end. Feeling 20 minutes too long at only 89 minutes, one has to question if it was really necessary to extend the original medium length film to a full length feature in the end. Unless a fan of the actors or the repetitive and oddly selected theme song, this one works best as mild curiosity or simply beam projected at a late night bar for background ambiance. 5/10
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