Rule Insanity Bliss

By RICHARD CORLISS

Outrage and ecstasy are in short supply these days. The first emotion is too righteous for the Age of Ambiguity; the second has been debased into the brand name of an upscale drug. So it is salutary for a film to examine and embrace those anachronistic, ever-so-'60s extremes. Bliss wants to pose the biggest questions -- about life, death and the twilight state in between that passes for existence -- in the weirdest way. It fulminates like a bag-lady savant on the toxic dangers of technology and moral compromise. It has big, randy dreams about its hero's search for a bucolic haven on earth. Extravagant or exasperating, Bliss puts nobody to sleep. At its world premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival, more than half of the international press stormed out. A few months later it won the Best Picture award in its native Australia. Outrage and ecstasy: the film provokes them too.

At its center is a genial gent named Harry Joy (Barry Otto), who loves his family, his ad-agency job, and the art of storytelling. After spinning one of his tales, Harry suffers a massive heart attack. For four minutes his soul leaves his body, and when it returns, the world seems just slightly insane. His wife is having it off with his partner -- on a table at Harry's favorite restaurant. His son displays a fondness for Nazi uniforms and sex with his sister. An executive at Harry's agency presents him with a list of carcinogens in the products they market. Time for a change, he figures; time to renounce the world and search for purity in the woods with Honey Barbara (Helen Jones), an aggressively free spirit who keeps bees and thrives on their honey. But the world renounces Harry first, exiling him to an asylum for the terminally idealistic.

< That's nowhere near the half of it. We haven't mentioned the cockroaches that crawl out of a wound in Harry's chest, the sardines that drop from between the legs of his philandering wife, the elephant that sits on his car -- or the wild cinematic verve that alchemizes each comic grotesquerie into images as vivid as a bad trip. But Bliss is no mere catalog of surrealist gross-outs. It yanks astonished laughs from the viewer to ease the way along a modern pilgrim's progress, one that finds salvation in the doggedness of obsessive love. Harry tracks his recalcitrant Honey to her home; when she rebuffs him, he plants honey-tree saplings that will take eight years to mature and produce the nectar she craves. And so he waits for the delivery of this long, arboreal love letter. The payoff is enough to bring Harry Joy, Honey Barbara and the viewer together in a state of amazing grace. It's called bliss.