The “repugnant” erotic drama that made Roger Ebert feel unclean: “An intensely depressing experience”
Like every other cinematic subgenre, if handled well, erotic drama has its merits. When it isn’t handled well, it can leave audiences with a bad taste in their mouth, as Roger Ebert discovered when he persevered through almost 100 minutes of a movie that made him feel like he needed a shower.
At one end of the spectrum for these very particular kinds of films are moving, emotional, and heartfelt explorations of intimacy, sensuality, and love. At the other end, there are skin flicks and exploitation stories that use sex and nudity as a means to sell themselves to the lowest common denominator.
As an adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s 1961 novella, which finds an elderly gentleman paying money to sleep next to unconscious naked young women in a brothel in the hopes of experiencing something more than the loneliness of his daily life while exploring the notions of mortality, desire, fantasy, and what it means to grow old in a world with nothing left to offer, writer and director Vadim Glowna’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties could only really go one of two ways.
Unfortunately, it chose the wrong one. In a one-star review, Ebert opined that the picture “has missed its ideal release window by about 40 years,” and that it “might have found an audience in the transitional period between soft and hardcore, when men would sit through anything to see a breast, but even then, I don’t know.”
That was him being kind, too, and his knives only got sharper. Glowna, who also plays the lead role of Edmond, spends most of his screen time delivering a “mournful interior soliloquy about his age, their perfection, his mother, a childhood sexual experience and his own misery,” which Ebert found to be “an intensely depressing experience” for both character and viewer alike.
As mentioned above, the narrative unfolds in a brothel overseen by Angela Winkler’s madame, who informs Edmond that her girls have been drugged to sleep the entire night, where he can sidle up to them as close as he wants for as long as he wants, as long as he doesn’t overstep the boundaries set before he enters, which is where Ebert drew the line.
“Do you find this premise anything but repugnant?” he asked. “It offends not only civilised members of both sexes, but even dirty old men, dramatising as it does their dirtiness and oldness. Obvious questions arise, but no, Madame will not explain why the women sleep so soundly, and the house rules strictly forbid any contact with the women outside the house.”
He still found the time for a zinger, though, commenting on the protagonist’s occupation as the head of a major corporation and passenger in a personal stretch limousine: “We’ve seen ultra-rich ‘Masters of the Universe’ before, but now we get the first ‘Masturbator of the Universe’. Low-hanging fruit, but it was there for the taking, and that was about the only enjoyment he got from The House of the Sleeping Beauties.
Ebert knew it was “intended as allegory,” even if he was “unsure what the allegory teaches us,” although he had a sneaking suspicion that it was nothing but vanity on the filmmaker’s part: “Perhaps the message is: You can see what can happen to you if you direct and star yourself in a movie like this.”
