House of the Sleeping Beauties

It would be easy to dismiss House of the Sleeping Beauties as a lewd male fantasy, but that would be ignoring the German film's deeper purpose as - in the words of the director, Vadim Glowna - a meditation on "transition, remembrance, mourning, guilt, loneliness, sex and death, eroticism and dying."

A self-indulgent and icky film, but reasonably well made and undeniably addictive.

Ultimately, the film doesn't succeed in its thematic aspirations, proving yet again that great literature doesn't usually transfer successfully to the screen.

With the mounting number of first-rate, even masterly foreign-language films locked out of movie theaters due to wary distributors, it's worth pondering why such laughable dreck as German actor-writer-director Vadim Glowna's House of the Sleeping Beauties actually made it through.

Not even the august presence of Maximilian Schell can dispel the odor of fusty smut that clings to House of the Sleeping Beauties, a clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence.

Glowna presents this smoky German feature as an elegy for lost youth, but it's so tumescent with male self-pity that I couldn't wait for it to end.

One of the year's worst releases. A second viewing of "Synecdoche" would be less painful.