‘Bliss’ Carries a Difficult Theme to Uneven Extremes

“Bliss” is an earnest yet half-baked message movie about how the source of sexual dysfunction in marriage can be caused by a repressed memory of childhood incest. That this is obviously a very serious, tricky subject doesn’t excuse writer-director Lance Young from turning out so academic and uneven a film. This is yet another of those blah Canadian movies that provide such a contrast to the venturesome work of two north-of-the-border mavericks, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. (If only either one of them, Egoyan especially, had made this film!)

Maria (Sheryl Lee) and Joseph (Craig Sheffer) seem a perfectly normal, attractive upper-middle-class young couple who six months after their wedding wind up in the office of a marriage counselor (Spalding Gray). Their complaints with each other seem petty, but Joseph goes into a tailspin when Maria finally admits she fakes her orgasms. Then he discovers she’s seeing a controversial sex therapist, Baltazar (Terence Stamp), who believes that having sex with his female patients is the only way to cure them.

When Joseph angrily confronts Baltazar, the sexual healer unleashes a torrent of statements as to the delicacy of Maria’s mental state. “She’s a borderline personality . . . in a state of repressed paranoia . . . childhood trauma,” declares Baltazar to Joseph, who seems far more concerned with breaking through his wife’s frigidity than with whatever may be contributing to it. In an incredible twist, Joseph insists successfully that he replace his wife as Baltazar’s patient so that he can improve his lovemaking techniques. (You get the impression that Baltazar’s key text may be the Kama Sutra.)

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Young doesn’t give us the scene in which Baltazar tells Maria she can no longer be his patient, but then throughout most of the film, he has her therapists and husband tell us about her rather than letting us discover her for ourselves. Essentially, all we know about her is that she seemingly is frigid, vaguely unhappy and determined to rid her house of an invasion of ants.

Young gives us plenty of R-rated scenes of the couple struggling to achieve sexual ecstasy but gets coy once Baltazar and Joseph strip down to their shorts in preparation for the therapist teaching the young husband the secrets of great love-making.

Where the film does strike a valuable chord is to show that once Maria’s repressed memories of incest with her father surface, she discovers that she must deal with the guilt over the pleasure she did experience innocently within that incestuous relationship during its duration. It’s a shame that such an important point isn’t being made in a much better film.

Sheffer, very good at portraying a husband determined to go the distance in the name of true love, and Lee are actually quite effective, and Stamp and Gray are imperturbable in the tradition of movie therapists.

But “Bliss” ultimately leaves you wishing that, more perhaps than even Egoyan or Cronenberg, it had been made by a woman.

* MPAA rating: R, for graphic sex scenes with strong sex-related dialogue and for language. Times guidelines: The film is not hard-core but is blunt in its sex scenes and in its language.

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‘Bliss’

Craig Sheffer: Joseph

Sheryl Lee: Maria

Terence Stamp: Baltazar

Spalding Gray: Alfred Gray

A Triumph Films presentation of a Stewart Pictures presentation. Writer-director Lance Young. Producer Allyn Stewart. Executive producer Matthew O’Connor. Cinematographer Mike Molloy. Editor Allan Lee. Costumes Jori Woodman. Music Jan A.P. Kaczmarek. Production designers John Willett, David Lloyd Fischer. Art directors William Heslup, Eric Norlin. Set decorators Mary-Lou Storey, Barry Kemp. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.