In big-city Berlin, Sascha (Katharina Behrens) is a seasoned sex worker in a brothel, where slender women don enticing lingerie and maintain a professional illusion of simulating passion whilst having intercourse with male clients (some of whom are regulars; the men and the women greet each other with the familiarity of office colleagues). A newcomer to the place is Italian-born Jessy (Eva Collé, who is a gender-fluid-y internet "performance artist" and alleged real-life sex worker), nose-ringed and covered in tattoos. The (male) owner of the place calls Jessy "crazy" and apparently means it as a compliment.
The rookie girl acclimates to the work, and she strikes up a friendship with Sascha that quickly turns into a lesbian affair. Both characters—the whole narrative, really—is austere and closed-mouth (there isn't even any soundtrack music as such) about what is going on with these people beneath the surface, but Sascha eventually opens up to Jessy about having left behind a male ex and their 11-year-old son in her hated home village in Brandenburg. Sascha feels secure enough to take Jessy to meet them, but there are uncomfortable scenes, and the two women's relationship falters. In perhaps the most telling bit, streetwise Sascha declares that happiness (glück, or as the translated title would have it, "bliss) may be the one thing she is not able to face.
It is a truism in the history of LGBTQ cinema that directors often equated queer identity with sheer misery and psychosis. One may be tempted to see Bliss as something of a throwback to that, except the filmmaker is clearly on the women's side. The drama does not even strongly condemn prostitution, though the sense is that along with financial earnings and "empowerment" (maybe), something is being lost in the sex-trafficking transactions that cost these characters heavily in their off-the-clock relationships, and that may be the real point. It is discussion-worthy, yet at the same time put in terms ambiguous enough to be rather maddening.
Those may be trifles to buyers having to deal with the more obvious things: full-frontal male nudity (somewhat more extreme than the female nudity, softcore sex, language and themes. In liberal-minded international-cinema collections (and/or ones with a German cultural orientation), Bliss deserves a look. It is not grindhouse exploitation, certainly, but is not for all viewership tastes either.