Popular actress Jane (Iza Calzado) is left to recuperate in a rest house after an on-set accident while filming her latest movie. She is soon tormented by strange occurrences within her house and feels trapped somehow. But what is really happening?
Bliss is best described as a psychological thriller, but the film itself defies convenient classification. It traces its lineage back to films that traverse the line of reality and fiction, as protagonists view their own dark reflections (usually through the performing arts.) I felt echoes of Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue (1997) and Millennium Actress, Rob Reiner's Misery (1990; the title of Bliss even references this film) and Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) among others. But it is Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) that resonates with this film the most: in Bergman's film, a nurse takes care of an actress who has decided to stop speaking; through their interactions and stories their personas merge and mix into something amorphous and abstract. Persona acts as a template for this film, though Bliss does something interesting with its premise that makes it more than just a copy.
While we are shown the stories of the different people involved in Jane's life, the film centers around the stories of Jane and Rose (Adrienne Vergara). Rose's character is a dark mirror of Jane's, a nurse with a twisted, perverse streak. Her screen image is off-putting, even grotesque, with streaks of Annie Wilkes and Perfect Blue's Rumi. Her existence and that of Jane's mirror Alma and Elisabet Vogler in Bergman's film. In this case, both Jane and Rose are characters eaten by the monstrous system of showbusiness, withered into insanity, husks of their former selves.
This portrayal of the true monster behind the film - that of our local entertainment culture - is something that is rare in our local cinema. Our entertainment culture has been examined before as satire, but rarely, if at all, through the lens of a psychological thriller. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that this film was conceptualized during the period where some prominent local directors died, directly or indirectly through overwork. In the films of other countries, the lure of showbusiness proves to be self destructive; films like Mika Ninagawa's Helter Skelter (2012) even manifests this self-destruction in the form of actual bodily damage, her protagonists slowly disintegrating from the inside. Here, the exploitation of Jane takes on two forms: her deteriorating mental state and her body, which has been exploited physically (as seen in her various injuries) and in other, perverse ways.
Perhaps to serve local audiences, Bliss holds our hand through its enigma; one can easily figure out what's going on with Jane in the first 10 minutes if one pays enough attention. Like with most of Tarog's films, we see the inherent irony of the film's ending - while people supposedly 'concerned' with the well being of Jane bicker with each other, darker things happen out of sight.
While not my favorite Jerrold Tarog film, Bliss is an interesting experiment, a perverse subversion of genre and structure, and a film that will keep local audiences talking for years to come.
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