Closer Look: Fairy Tale Adventures in Catherine Breillat’s La belle endormie

Make this 2 for 2 for French author Charles Perrault (1628 – 1703) and Catherine Breillat. The controversial French filmmaker is presenting La Belle endormie (Sleeping Beauty) in Venice Film Festival this year and is tipped for TIFF directly after. She mentions that “unlike Barbe Bleue, I would like to consider this fairytale not as a story that two girls tell each other, but as the story of a girl being born (she does not yet know into what world), and creates her own little girl’s world. Childhood is a long and ruthless limbo that precedes adolescence – even if that is precisely when the fairytale beginning of the story is set. Hence the girl grows little by little and becomes an adolescent, who naively believes that she knows everything about life. But life is not a fairytale, and love during adolescence is like early motherhood, which leads to a different life reality. It “brings your feet back on the ground”, as they say. It is therefore no longer a fairytale, but an account of a life that is beginning”.

Here are some stills from the film interpreted by a mostly unknown cast: Carla Besnaïnou (Anastasia), Kérian Mayan (Peter), Julia Artamonov (Anastasia at age 16), and David Chausse (Johan).