Parallel lives
Salma Hayek gets unreal in Amazon’s sci-fi ‘Bliss’
Salma Hayek tackles her most demanding role yet in the science fiction puzzler “Bliss,” streaming Friday on Amazon. “This was a huge chal- lenge,” Hayek, 54, said in a Zoom interview this week.
“The director (Mike Cahill), who’d never thought of anyone else for this role, had a lot of expectations from me.”
“Bliss” begins as Owen Wilson’s Greg, recently divorced, suddenly jobless and nightmarishly hunted as a murder suspect, meets Hayek’s Isabel, a very free spirit who regards their homeless shelter, various street people and occasional prostitution as a “simulation,” not the real world.
Magical and frightening things, including a whole other reality, follow.
“It’s full of dualities, this film. Parallel realities because Owen and I are for most of the film just us two.”
Cahill, who also wrote the original script, “wanted to give two possibilities of interpretation to the film.
“One, you could see it as a story of addiction. The other you could see a story of a blissful world where everything is perfect but people have lost the appreciation for it.
“So there is a simulation created with ugly worlds where you can go experience a little bit of struggle and ugliness so that when you come back to Bliss, you can appreciate and enjoy it again as if it was the first time.
“Because humans too fast, too often get so used to beauty they stop appreciating it.”
Hayek had a surprise once filming finished and the pandemic quarantine prompted her to view “Bliss” differently.
“In lockdown all of a sudden you’re wondering if that other world we were living in so much was Bliss?
“You start having an appreciation for going to a restaurant, hugging a friend, actually go to the cinema to watch the movies.
“And this question of what’s real and what’s not real? You know: What is the truth here? As we enter into an era, without going to a parallel reality in a different dimension, it appears to me like the world is simultaneously coexisting in different realities.”
What kind of different realities?
“People you thought you knew — they see things and react in a completely different way than you see it. It turns out there’s a lot of people who don’t even think the earth is round!
“What’s great about the movie is that towards the end my character learns to accept and to respect people choosing different realities than the ones she knows.
“I think that’s an important thing to learn today.”