On a mansion balcony overlooking the sea, Robert Troy slides close to Scarlett, a woman draped in a funeral veil, and the air is thick with quiet grief. They talk about the young man they mourn, and Troy asks if Scarlett ever truly loved him; she answers with a soft, unambiguous truth, admitting that she did. The moment hints at the deep, performative rituals that define their privileged, cloistered world.
Troy’s curiosity soon lures him to a carnival, where a shoddily glamorous “Sleeping Beauty” attraction sits under a striped tent. Inside, a carny dressed as a doctor collaborates with two women in nurse outfits to stage a medical tableau. The doctor declares that red-blooded men can pay another $1 to plant a kiss and attempt to wake the Sleeping Beauty. After the show, Troy presses the carny for details about the woman’s identity and condition: she has been asleep for eight years. The doctor offers to leave Troy alone with her for $50, but Troy wants more than a private moment; he asks how much it would cost to buy her. The carny suggests $20,000 and, without flinching, Troy agrees. A bottle is produced, with a warning that its contents will keep the woman asleep. Troy takes the sleeping beauty back to the mansion, a purchase that feels like a ritual transaction that seals their fate.
Back at home, Troy informs Scarlett that he has bought a Sleeping Beauty. He then quits the nightlife for a while and returns to his regular gig, playing baritone sax and leading a six-piece band at a nightclub. After his set, he checks in with a junkie named Jeff to ensure the pills Troy procured are being used, hinting at the shadow economy that threads through their glamorous life. Scarlett and Troy inhabit a gilded, secretive domain: a mansion where privilege is a game, and the rules are carefully choreographed. They stage elaborate dramas with each other and with a rotating cast of women. Scarlett runs what passes for a finishing school, and her newest student is a woman named Angelica, who wears a French maid’s uniform and serves Scarlett and Troy with careful, almost ceremonial attention. Scarlett gently corrects Angelica’s missteps, rehearsing power and control as if dressed in costume.
Meanwhile, the Sleeping Beauty awakens. Her name is Jennifer, and Troy gradually introduces her to the world she has missed. He guides her through the mansion, and together they watch Scarlett and Angelica perform a dance routine in nun costumes. When the jukebox shifts into a tango, Troy quickly switches it off and draws a curtain to hide the others from Jennifer. He tucks her into bed, and Jennifer thanks him for waking her with a line that echoes the old tale: > I’d sleep another hundred years, O love, for such another kiss. Troy jokes that he did not kiss her to wake her; she insists she did not sleep for a century.
Troy descends again, lifts the curtain, and discovers Scarlett and Angelica still frozen in their nun tableau. The curtain falls away, and the couple resumes their dance, now with a new tension that hints at what lies ahead.
The following day, Troy and Jennifer—no longer simply a dream or a possession—dress and head to a jazz club. The room is quiet except for Jeff, and Troy dedicates a private song to the two people he loves most: Jeff and Jennifer. When he returns home, he tells Scarlett that he plans to take Jennifer away, confessing that his feelings for her feel genuine and not like the manufactured reality he and Scarlett have long maintained. Scarlett, sensing the shift in him, persuades Troy to let Jennifer stay for a while to test the sincerity of his emotions.
At night, after the club closes, a topless waitress dances as a cheerleader for Troy. He spins a long, elaborate fantasy about who she’s rooting for, inviting her to improvise and sell the moment, but when he finally goes home, he makes love to Jennifer for the first time. In the wake of this intimacy, Troy recognizes that his feelings are real and he and Jennifer depart the mansion together in the Sleeping Beauty van that symbolized his purchase.
A brief interlude away from the mansion ends with a return. Scarlett and Angelica reappear in nun costumes, and Scarlett reveals that Angelica has shaved her head to join their order. Troy dons a priest costume, and Scarlett pretends to initiate Jennifer as a novice. The ruse shatters Troy’s sense of control; he watches as the ceremony proceeds and, in a gesture of heartbreak, drains a portion of the sleeping potion into Jennifer’s wine.
Jennifer, now aware of the game’s rules but wanting to extend the fantasy, asks why Troy will not keep playing forever, as if she were a child. As she grows tired from the potion, Troy carries her away, a bittersweet act that signals the end of one era and the beginning of another. The final tableau returns Jennifer to the Sleeping Beauty tent, while Troy assumes the role of the doctor and Scarlett reprises hers as the nurse, underscoring the film’s central theme: a world built on performance, power, and perpetual play eventually collides with genuine feeling that cannot be easily contained or forgotten.
This tale, saturated with luxury and decadence, probes the tension between control and care, the cost of waking someone from a dream, and the price of choosing authenticity over illusion. The characters move through stages and roles as if on a never-ending stage, and the narrative lingers on the moment when a person’s true connection cannot be reduced to a game, even as the machinery of their world keeps turning.
