Bliss was originally released as a 135-minute transposition adaptation of Peter Carey's critically acclaimed novel of the same name. Peter Carey's collaboration with the relatively inexperienced Lawrence on the script resulted in a screenplay that remained true to the text in almost all respects. This version, when screened at its full length at Cannes, was received poorly. Carey's response was to re-cut and re-mix the film, resulting in a 110-minute version which displays a greater degree of focus on the main character, and his adulating quest of self-discovery. Lawrence cleverly extracted the brilliant, and eliminated the banal in this later version, which displays a greater understanding of the cinematic form.
This later version still maintained a large degree of fidelity to its source, but the replacement of aural metaphors with surreal vision, the combination of scenes, and an increased focus on the three leads; those being Honey Barbara (Helen Jones), Harry Joy (Barry Otto) and Bettina Joy (Lynette Curran), spawned a commentary adaptation that is better suited to the screen.
Lawrence opted to maintain a similar narrative form to that reflected in the literary version. Harry, a born storyteller, narrates the film in flashback, as he seems to be doing in Carey's book. The film is also littered with subjective imagery, which often seems to come from the imagination of another character, as in the book. Cleverly, though, Lawrence kept these asides as a series of brief surreal encounters (such as the sardine incident, David's transformation into a Nazi, Bettina and Joel's sexual romp in the café), maintaining Harry's reminiscence as the core of the narrative, thus congealing the otherwise chaotic perspectives traversed by the film's content.
In recording and interpreting such a formidable and intensely psychological work, Lawrence has scattered implicit clues; surreal imagery, motifs, small passages of dialogue - that realise the most important of these asides, without creating a haphazard vision.
Bettina Joy's pathological hatred of her lower-class background, and her fear of petrol, are established in one single sequence in which she refuses to wind down her car window to thank her father for filling her tank. David Joy's (Miles Buchanan) capitalist desires, his criminal fantasies and his desire to establish a ruthless image in order to dominate others is realised in a scene in which he sits alone in his bedroom/office counting money, before seemingly transforming into a Nazi as he demands that his sister trade certain sexual privileges for the drugs that he trades. Honey Barbara's uncontrollable nature, and her deliberate inability to adapt to urban life is suggested in her attitudes relating to sexual freedom, and, more subtly, in the fact that one of her shoulder straps is almost always off her shoulder. Implicitly, Lawrence reveals early in the work that she is a wild, passionate romanticist whose spirit cannot be contained by the sophistications of contemporaneous urban life. Similarly, Lawrence has constructed Harry Joy's intricate sense of self-induced psychosis through the combination of his voiceover and shocking surreal imagery such as Harry's waking moments during his operation, his post-operative cockroach incident and the bleeding image of a crucified Christ (symbolising Harry's loss of faith). By utilising cinema's visual scope, Lawrence successfully forged a number of complex characters in little more than a few seconds of screen time, thus eliminating the audience's necessity to hear important details regarding each character.
