Bliss

Bliss  

Ray Lawrence

 

I am still fighting with this film even now which makes it difficult to write about.

 

If it had to be summarised the story is about Harry Joy (Barry Otto) who dies for four minutes after a heart attack. When he is revived his thoughts about life and his business in advertising change when he realizes his wife is having an affair with his business partner Joel. It is this realization that his family is falling to pieces and his world is coming apart when his son is selling cocaine and handing it to his little sister for sexual rewards and that Harry’s advertising company is promoting products that cause cancer. It isn’t until he meets Honey, a hippie free thinker who deals in prostitution that his eyes are re-opened. Eventually they move to the forest and build a life for themselves.

 

The thing I liked about this film most was its complicated nature was mirrored in the stylistic approach to the film. Still, I found it frustrating that I was fighting to find the story within it, anything to grasp hold of. I seemed to be asking, is this real? Is this a story within a story? What is going on? It seemed that within the first twenty minutes I had floated into someone’s daydream, which slipped between a warped world of reality and the surreal. This frustrated me because I believe it made me miss the point of some of the highly creative sections such as when Harry dies which I think I could have got a lot more out of than I did.

 

It was the scene where Bettinna, Harry’s wife and his business partner, Joel, are having sex on the country club restraint table when the film takes a look around to see the reaction of the other patrons, there is no reaction it allowed me to connect the strory with the abstract nature of the film to make a point related to the plot. It allowed me to relax into the surreal/ real frame of mind and was able to accept the warped nature of the film. From then on I enjoyed the play between the real and surreal. Still I think that there wasn’t enough connection between them for me to allow the real and surreal to really work which was a shame.

 

However, I still felt that the experimental visual approach to these issues were fantastic. I loved Harry’s death shot from “dead man’s bird’s eye” view. There were also scatterings of abstract sequences which I though were amazing such as the dead body floating in water that we are drawn to through layers of sewed which is amazing. However, they usually distracted me as a viewer than added to the strength of the film.

 

Still it was an interesting and very experimental piece of cinema and I like that this kind of work is coming out of Australia even with such a small market, Ray Laurence wasn’t scared to take risks, it’s a great attitude to have.