House of the Sleeping Beauties

A meandering, self-indulgent rumination on old age, death and unfulfillable desire (or unrepentant horniness), German actor-director Vadim Glowna’s adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s surreal, ironic short story gets everything but the surrealism and irony right. This shifts the tale—about a brothel in which impotent old men pay to cuddle with artificially slumbering hotties—away from Kawabata’s reflective critique of youth-draining machismo, to a visually lush occasion for Glowna to show the world he can still get it up.