Jane Campion presents SLEEPING BEAUTY, a fascinating depiction of a young woman's reckless decent into a shocking world of erotic desires. Lucy (Emily Browning in a breakthrough performance) is a young university student possessed by a kind of radical passivity, letting coin tosses decide random sexual encounters and enduring her menial jobs with an uncomplaining patience. After answering an ad in the student newspaper for a lingerie waitress, Lucy is secretly initiated into the job of a Sleeping Beauty, for which she is sedated and given in absolute submission to her clients. As this unnerving experience begins to bleed into her daily life, Lucy develops the courage to break the spell and discover what happens to her while she sleeps. First-time director Julia Leigh creates a bold cinematic vision with her shocking retelling of the classic myth that poses its heroine as a rarified sex-worker confronting ideas of feminine sexuality with bravado and precision.

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In outline, this might sound like either a grim cautionary tale or a prurient adventure in exploitation. And “Sleeping Beauty” does now and then take note of the bleak and lonely aspects of Lucy’s circumstances. Much more often, the camera lingers over Ms. Browning’s unclothed form, inviting the viewer’s eye to survey every inch of her milky and unblemished skin. There is a measure of soft-core titillation in this, for sure, but Ms. Leigh observes Lucy’s body and what happens to it with a dreamy detachment that is seductive and unnerving in equal measure. As well as a little ridiculous. Though the tone is quiet and the pacing serenely unhurried, “Sleeping Beauty” is at times almost screamingly funny, a pointed, deadpan surrealist sex farce that Luis Buñuel might have admired.