He asked how McGrath had dealt with his airstrip. It is nevertheless one of a kind: a droll, dry and mordantly amusing comedy-drama that exists in a Twilight Zone-esque world impossible togauge or define.A few months later Carey met McGrath again and told him about the difficulties he was having with his image of the woman and boy. It is as if the film is also contemplating its existence and returning mixed messages about how to save itself. Released on DVD in the director’s original 129-minute cut (22 minutes were shaved from the running time after the fiasco at Cannes), Bliss feels a little unfocused as it scrambles towards conclusion. His presence is a perfect, bedraggled embodiment of a character who cannot be saved nor condemned a helpless soul constantly rubbing up against the grim knowledge that no matter what he does, he will always be trapped inside himself. Perhaps Harry is stuck in a tailored purgatory – a nightmarish, fatalistic reconstruction of his own existence, where he feels compelled to act in moral ways (including knocking back a lucrative job offer because the product being pitched causes cancer) but can never achieve reward or satisfaction.įrazzled and lethargic, with eyes that look as though they’ve been burnt by salt, Barry Otto is both vibrant and soporific. Nobody looks or pays it any mind we understand this is not reality per se but a sleepy mystery land just to the left of it. Harry’s wife Bettina (Lynette Curran) is having a shamelessly torrid affair with his business partner Joel (Jeff Truman), while Harry’s daughter performs oral sex on his son (dressed in a Nazi uniform, no less) to obtain cocaine.Īn early scene shows Bettina and Joel getting it on in plain view in a busy restaurant. He spends the remainder of the film contemplating two options: a) that he is in hell or b) that he has gone mad.īad things are happening around him. Things start to get weird – and by George, they get weird quickly – when Harry finds a way back to his body. After capturing Harry and his family around a crowded dinner table, the film transitions outside to where Harry is lying face down in the grass, dead from a heart attack. Harry’s big problem is that he’s about to die.

Based in a world which is sort of reality and sort of not, Bliss has the psychological restlessness of a Terry Gilliam head trip (think Brazil or The Fisher King) and the cryptic symbolism of a Peter Greenaway picture, pared back with a domestic day-to-day aesthetic focused on unspectacular things: the home the office the garden.Ī soft-voiced elderly narrator explains that we are about to watch the story of Harry Joy (Barry Otto), a middle-aged adman who lives a nondescript life with a wife he loves, a son studying to become a doctor and a daughter set to be a social worker.

Peter carey bliss review