Bliss (Ray Lawrence, 1985) is a flm no-one quite knows what to do with. Despite winning several of the major cate- gories at the 1985 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, it’s a movie that doesn’t ft 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 posi- tive commentary while positioning it within an ‘eccentric’, low-key strand of production largely centred in Melbourne; though Bliss, of course, is a profoundly Sydney flm 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 flm – 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’ flm in his quadripar- tite categorisation of the Australian cinema of this period. 3 Scott Murray, less predictably, questions Bliss’ ‘fractured approach’ as it moves between ‘odd moments of success- ful shock, and others of plain silliness’, while lamenting that Lawrence is often ‘unable to stop his flm jerking along, and often just dying’. 4 Despite this, Murray also praises the movie for offering ‘one of the fnest romantic resolutions in Australian cinema’. 5 David Stratton is characteristically more thorough in his accounting of the flm’s inception, pro- duction, and commercial and critical fate, but his analysis of the text itself is limited in scope, inexactly and hyperbolical- ly 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 flm’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 ‘unflmable’ 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 flm 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 Bliss ADRIAN DANKS Ray Lawrence’s Bliss, adapted from Peter Carey’s novel, remains one of the most idiosyncratic and controversial items in Australian flm history. Adrian Danks’ brilliantly researched article offers a fascinating account of the uproar it caused at Cannes and the largely hostile critical reaction it initially met with. Generically unclassifable and utterly at odds with the Australian flm output at the time, it nevertheless experienced some critical and box-offce turnaround when it won several AFI awards, including for Best Film, in 1985. Danks charts its remarkable history with impressive detail and eloquent readability. Brian McFarlane, Series Editor PART 51 THE NFSA RESTORES COLLECTION 108 • Metro Magazine 207 | © ATOM