Don’t find your BLISS

Terence Stamp insists Craig Sheffer masturbate. How can you properly love another, if you can’t properly love yourself, the sex therapist inquires rhetorically. Maybe the unorthodox shrink is onto something, but even if right, no one need witness the young lead’s not-so-instant gratification. And while the movie avoids spying directly on Sheffer’s self-love, watching BLISS still feels like self-abuse.

Written and directed by Lance Young, BLISS plays like the one-shot auteur’s tribute to a recovering loved one… or a revered teacher. Unfortunately, rather than script believable characters with back-stories slowly and cleverly revealed, the filmmaker focuses on the peculiar practice of a tantric therapist his colleagues would prefer disbarred. Why? Because he screws his clients literally? Yes. (Stamp takes a licking, but he gives better than he gets, apparently, as women stream thru his office on the hour, every hour.) Because he’s daft? That would be my argument. (Stamp cancels one client to service the spouse with little regard to conscience or closure.) 

Of course some — like Bill Arnold of the Seattle P-I — will celebrate BLISS for its carnal courage, its sexual candor, as if getting actors bare-assed and having them yak poetic were the ultimate money shot. Please. Cinemax, Zalman King and The Red Shoe Diaries have more effectively packaged boobs, rubes and claptrap for years with half the pretentiousness… and much better visuals. When BLISS finally unveils its darkest secrets, they still seem to have come prematurely, unearned… as if the whole payoff were faked. Likely, Lance Young’s sentiments are sincere, but his dramatic fumbling remains off-putting; akin to listening to a homely neighbor recount his emulation of Sting‘s legendary — and lengthy — bedroom heroics. 

The moral: find your bliss, then keep it to yourself.