This is a romantic comedy about a young filmmaker with sex hang-ups who longs for the big break into features and who 'journeys to the dark-side’ of her profession to realise her ambition.
Sweet and talented, Jody (the very likable Leelee Sobieski) leaves film school an award winner but finds the industry doesn’t want to know about her pet project, a silly but honest rom-com, a script derived from Jody’s own misadventures in scoring a man. She eventually lands a great gig with a production house. Trouble is (for Jody), it specialises in porn. This creates a swirl of embarrassment for a girl who’s not only sexually inexperienced, but is somewhat morally snooty about sex on screen and the people who perform it.
The script gets some cheap-shot laughs at the industry and its jargon (Jody’s never heard of ATM before and if, dear reader, you haven’t either, then I don’t think I can explain it on this site with getting into trouble so I won’t).
Before you can say 'action’ Jody falls for the handsome but emotionally remote porn auteur, Jeff Drake (Matthew Davis). Meanwhile Jody plots to exploit the studio, the actors and the facilities to make her own film...
Written and directed by Julie Davis, Finding Bliss has got a heavy load of tidied up, R-rated porn action (a brief shot of full frontal male nudity, lots of 'trash-talk’...) but it's pushed into the background and harvested for gags, not titillation. Indeed its attitude to sex and romance is old-fashioned and sentimentalised, and the trajectory of Jody’s character comes straight out of a 30s screwball comedy.
The single most interesting twist is Jody's own dark side – she's quite happy to manipulate everyone to get her movie made, and it's purely on the basis that she feels morally and socially superior to them. Sadly, this intriguing piece of character development is glossed over. Jody seems to magically readjust her thinking out of guilt and, it seems, because the film needs a happy ending.
Finding Bliss is about 'straightening out' Jody’s selfish, small-minded moral economy so she can be 'free’ enough to love without qualification. Sounds positively progressive, but it’s hard to take when Davis spends so much of the movie condescending to porn and its purveyors – the very world that 'liberated’ her heroine.
