Beauty Sleep – Lisa Star
Beauty Sleep is a modernized Sleeping Beauty. Aura is a middle-aged single mother and
psychic who falls into a coma when struck down by an ‘art car’ – a Buick covered with
tiny plastic figurines – and is separated from her beloved, a married carpenter named
Rob.
There are allusions as well to Snow White: Aura’s young daughters Soleil and Gabrielle
act as dwarves tending their comatose mother. They are the third generation of Northern
California’s countercultural movement and are savvy to its key principles of the seven
chakras, psychotherapy and marijuana. They are cared for by their maternal grandmother,
who holds great disdain for the Western medical establishment. She would rather revive
her daughter with her skills as a renegade spiritual warrior.
The hospital room is transformed from non-descript, institutional isolation to a New Age
healing center, inspired by Soleil and Gabrielle’s rainbow art pieces and their
grandmother’s portraits of Buddha, Christ and Bob Dylan. Through this Technicolor
setting rotate the nurses of the ward: the good fairy – an Anglo-Saxon Rastafarian night
attendant named Zion – and the bad fairy representing manners and morality, Nurse
Christiane.
The girls are the center of the hospital scenes, alternately and in unison trying to reclaim
their mother from the abyss of her coma, rarely letting on their desperation. Gabrielle,
age 8, treats her mother like a giant Barbie, attending to her coiffure and making sure that
her queenly beauty is preserved through outfit changes and unwanted hair removal.
Soleil, 13, is less apt to see the fairytale leanings of her mother’s plight; behind her
stoicism she is weighing the odds that she will be orphaned and left to be reared by her
embarrassing hippie Nana. She takes it upon herself to come up with a plan for awaking
her mother: the summoning of Aura’s musical hero, Peter Gabriel.
Beauty Sleep is interlaced with flashbacks that describe the portentous love affair
between Aura and Rob, a carpenter who came to build a spiral staircase when Aura was
freshly abandoned by her husband. It was Rob who reintroduced Aura to Peter Gabriel’s
music catalogue, and the songs become a soundtrack to their ill-fated romance, which
takes place mostly in the mythic nature setting of a man-made reservoir. Through a cycle
of seasons, seven years before her coma, Aura and Rob meet, fall in love, have an
adulterous affair and are poignantly separated by the circumstances of Rob’s marriage.
Aura’s loss of Rob wears her down in the ensuing years as if, when the art car careens
into her and puts her a state of suspension between life and death, this is actually just a
deus ex machina to let her rest in peace while the world is put back in order around her.
Beauty Sleep is a fairytale for adults, fully comic and tragic, ironic and enchanting. It
invokes the music of Peter Gabriel from an earlier era, when many middle-aged people
were adolescent. All the innocence and anguish of love and loss from those teenage years
is resurrected in this film, and beautifully, maturely resolved.