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Bliss 20216/30/2023 ![]() ![]() 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 Yamada’s 2020 film Life:Untitled both set aside cinema’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. Most are polite, understanding it as a professional transaction. It’s nothing unusual, just a question of creating simple fantasies and performing routine tasks for assorted male guests. She’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 one’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 stranger’s eye across a crowded room. ![]()
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