Bliss

Bliss (Ray Lawrence, 1985) is a film no-one quite knows what to do with. Despite winning several of the major categories at the 1985 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, it’s a movie that doesn’t fit neatly within accounts of Australian cinema history. While some prominent critics such as Paul Byrnes have been fulsome and consistent in their praise over time,¹ Bliss is still not widely discussed in generalist accounts of Australian cinema, even those that focus on the production boom and increasingly disparate output of the 1980s. Susan Dermody provides passingly positive commentary while positioning it within an ‘eccentric’, low-key strand of production largely centred in Melbourne; though Bliss, of course, is a profoundly Sydney film and less constrained in its form and sensibility than its sisters in this category. But even she regards Bliss as an anomaly, seeing it as a film – alongside the ragtag bunch of Mouth to Mouth (John Duigan, 1978), Malcolm (Nadia Tass, 1986) and The Year My Voice Broke (Duigan, 1987) – ‘that got away in another sense, into the mainstream marketplace’.² Tom O’Regan positions it as an ‘art’ film in his quadripartite categorisation of the Australian cinema of this period.³ Scott Murray, less predictably, questions Bliss’ ‘fractured approach’ as it moves between ‘odd moments of successful shock, and others of plain silliness’, while lamenting that Lawrence is often ‘unable to stop his film jerking along, and often just dying’.⁴ Despite this, Murray also praises the movie for offering ‘one of the finest romantic resolutions in Australian cinema’.⁵ David Stratton is characteristically more thorough in his accounting of the film’s inception, production, and commercial and critical fate, but his analysis of the text itself is limited in scope, inexactly and hyperbolically emphasising its ‘extremely audacious’ mix of ‘astonishing beauty, black humour, and the genuinely bizarre in almost equal proportions’.⁶ While Stratton’s discussion does start to get at its curious, even mercurial qualities, he can’t adequately account for the film’s disarming mix of tones, styles, genres and modes of performance. Based on the Miles Franklin Award–winning novel by Peter Carey about an advertising man whose world is turned upside down after he ‘survives’ a heart attack,⁷ Bliss remains a singular fusion of tragedy and farce, social realism and surrealism, magic realism and family melodrama, the grotesque and the poetic, life and death, dream and reality, ecological critique and rhapsodic pastoral, heaven and hell, the postmodern and the prelapsarian. It also stands triumphantly as an allegedly ‘unfilmable’ yet widely celebrated literary source that has been successfully adapted to the screen.

Bliss was notorious for the vehemence of its hostile initial reception at the Cannes Film Festival in mid May 1985, as well as the glee with which members of the – mostly – Sydney press reported on the hundreds of walkouts at these initial screenings.⁸ This response was part and parcel of a growing antipathy towards the Australian film industry and its output at this time, a sentiment partly fuelled by the levels of government support the industry was ‘still’ receiving ten years after the revival; the commercial and artistic failure of many of the films that had been released; and the often detrimental market-driven effects of the 10BA tax-incentive system then in place.⁹ Sympathetic Sydney Morning Herald journalist Richard Glover tried to account for this gloating response to Bliss in his lengthy report on the frenzied initial reception it received from the Australian press:

You can see it as a story of how Australians cut down tall poppies; as a story about the Australian media and how it works; or as an example of how a myth is being created among us, on little evidence, that the Australian film industry is artistically dead.¹⁰

Bliss stepped into a highly contestable marketplace that reflected the increasingly transnational nature of film production and the general squeezing out of many ‘inwardlooking’ Australian films.

Decades later, the film’s producer, Anthony Buckley, claimed that the international reception was actually generally positive, as reflected in complimentary reviews by prominent critics like David Thomson and Derek Malcolm after the Cannes screenings; its invitations to major film festivals such as London, New York and Sundance;¹¹ and the relatively wide release it received across various countries.¹² He nevertheless also reminisced, ‘At home the press were to have a field day. It was open slaughter.’¹³ As Lawrence himself somewhat hyperbolically announced at the time to Glover, ‘[The film] has been killed by three gossip columnists who have never seen it and I’m stunned by their power.’¹⁴

But this response also needs to be positioned within a broader industry context. The year of 1985 was not a very successful one for Australian feature films either critically or commercially. It was blighted by the significant failure of prominent mid-to-large-budget Australian movies such as The Naked Country (Tim Burstall, 1985), Robbery Under Arms (Donald Crombie & Ken Hannam, 1985), Burke & Wills (Graeme Clifford, 1985) and The Empty Beach (Chris Thomson, 1985). Significant financial success was mainly restricted to movies with strong overseas connections: Peter Weir’s Paramount-produced and US-shot Witness (1985); and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller & George Ogilvie, 1985). Even the considerably less feted Mrs. Soffel (1984), Gillian Armstrong’s first US-produced and -shot movie, remained one of the more successful Australian-related films at the box office that year. As a result of this, Bliss stepped into a highly contestable and even questionable marketplace that reflected the increasingly transnational nature of film production and The following year, of course, saw the release of the film that joined these two traditions together, going on to become the most financially successful Australian film of all time at the local box office: Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986).