Little bit of spoilerism...
I really enjoyed the feel of this film but a nagging doubt was in the back of my mind, because it reminded me of something else. The pacing and the overall feel is very Japanese, particularly those writers from the post-Edo period, who worked in the 30's and 40's and who pined for the old values...
Then the title of a book I saw yesterday grabbed me...
This central premise of this film - a girl is placed in a deep sleep so that impotent old men can ogle and touch her - is heavily based upon a short story by Yasunari Kawabata called House Of The Sleeping Beauties, written in 1961. Kawabata is not credited in the end-titles. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 and died in 1972.
Leigh is playing with this information, obviously thinking of it as a hipsterish in-joke of the "you've probably never heard of it..." type. There are other references to works by Kawabata, such as the lecture about a game of Go. Kawabata wrote a novel called The Master Of Go in 1933 and it pretty covers the question by the lecturer in that scene. The whisking of the sleeping potion refers to the Japanese tea ceremony, a detailed description of which also occurs in one of Kawabata's stories (maybe Master of Go, I can't remember).
It is a pity she didn't acknowledge her dues to this excellent Japanese writer as awareness of his works out of Japan, while relatively substantial, is certainly not mainstream. Many more readers could have discovered his wonderful stories. Well not all that many, as hardly anyone watched the movie...
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