Everyone knows the canonical fairy tale of the enchanted princess. But probably no one would think of telling it differently - simply, the prince must cut through the briars encaging his love and wake her with a kiss. In Kawamoto’s somewhat sacrilegious conception, the prince is somehow absent and Sleeping Beauty never even falls into her proverbial sleep. The director, who shot the film in 1990 at Prague’s Bratři v triku Studio, stripped the story of illusion: in his psychoanalytically inspired interpretation, Sleeping Beauty atones for her mother’s transgression, even willing in doing so to sacrifice her innocence....