Bliss movie review professional#

MeiвЂ™s friendships and even her relationship with her mom has lots of up and downs, mostly due to big teenage emotions but Turning Red does a good job of portraying forgiveness between the characters. Mei is also a bit of an oddball and has an equally unique set of friends, each unique and their common theme is their love and support for Mei. It is here that love emerges.The character of Meilin is endearing, sheвЂ™s just a teenager trying to navigate her love for a boy band and the expectations of her overbearing mother. For most of the running time they exist as characters shaped by context only at critical moments in their relationship do we see them clearly: whole, fresh-faced, looking at the world with real awareness of its potential. ItвЂ™s the way that the protagonists are often placed off-centre, inviting us to pay just as much attention to the anonymous crowds or moving cityscapes in the background, and the way theyвЂ™re seen through glass or echoed by reflective surfaces, distorted, multiplied. ItвЂ™s not just the contrast between sex performed for work and sex as an expression of genuine personal desire itвЂ™s also the ways in which different characters are recognised as human, with the focus on faces, or reduced in the eyes of others to a collection of functional body parts. In that different space, where homophobia and stigma against sex work are much more potent, things begin to fall apart.Д«liss is one of those films whose craft may not immediately be apparent to the average viewer, but itвЂ™s a beautifully constructed piece of work. When she and Maria get serious, she decides that she really wants to introduce her to her son, so they take a trip there, coinciding with the local beer festival. She has a complicated past and a ten-year-old son, who lives with his father and his fatherвЂ™s new partner in the much more socially conservative Brandenburg. Unlike Maria, who has left most of the complications of her life behind (though she does still carry carefully concealed trauma), Sascha is compelled to traffic with the wider world. In the wider world, however, the situation is different. Within that space, all sorts of things can happen. Rather than being powerless there, the women hold the patriarchal world at bay, offering transactional sex on their terms and otherwise enjoying a degree of freedom not afforded to those who depend on male providers or are afraid of the stigma attached to their own sexual expression. The idea for the film arrived, director Henrika Kull has said, when she first visited this brothel on an earlier shoot and realised what a female-centred space it was. The man in room eight wants a hand job and a fanta. The women site around, bored, in their underwear. Some viewers will doubtless regognise similarities with Kana YamadaвЂ™s 2020 film Life:Untitled both set aside cinemaвЂ™s fantasies of sex work to engage with the way it works in the real world, and most brothels look the same the world over. Many are regulars, and they have their favourites.

Bliss movie review professional#

Most are polite, understanding it as a professional transaction. ItвЂ™s nothing unusual, just a question of creating simple fantasies and performing routine tasks for assorted male guests. SheвЂ™s the new girl, just 25, up from Italy and in need of a job that will enable her to keep up with the cost of living in Berlin. Maria (Adam Hoya) catches the eye of Sascha (Katharina Behrens) as soon as she enters the common room of the brothel where Sascha works. Once one starts to define oneвЂ™s passions in relation to what others say is possible or permissible, that essential leap of faith on which love depends becomes much, much harder.

Keeping it, however, requires an ability to orientate oneself first and foremost in regard to that individual, without overdue reference to the rest of the world. Sometimes finding love is as easy as catching a strangerвЂ™s eye across a crowded room.