The novel invited the rare earned enthusiasm, with critics (including this one) praising its restrained writing, humor and keen observations. Meditations on immigration, capitalism and religion crop up without interrupting the exigent, compulsive tenor of the crew’s journey to a mysterious place called the Facility.

“Severance” begins as a sardonic take on contemporary office life, but its potency lies in Ma’s narrative dexterity: When Candance eventually leaves the city, she joins a group of survivors, an odd assortment of people, who promise her salvation. As they move languorously through the world, observing and operating with a cool detachment, their questionable choices - stalking an ex-lover, having sex with a Yeti, living with her husband and 100 ex-boyfriends - fuel the narratives, and heighten their stakes.

The women populating these stories are not merely at the center, they are the center. Ling Ma’s own “Bliss Montage” is a surreal subversion of this trope. Basinger called this sequence the Happy Interlude, or the Bliss Montage. These were “a woman’s small piece of action,” Basinger explained, “the rapid and brief passage of time in which a woman can be happy.” They signaled the film’s fleeting interest in a woman’s actions instead of her endurance of social terrors - heartbreak, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, etc. In her 1993 book “A Woman’s View,” the film historian Jeanine Basinger observed a peculiar phenomenon in early Hollywood movies about women: They almost always included a sequence depicting “the protagonist in her marginal territory of joy.” Sound-tracked by a swelling score, the elegantly dressed leading lady would, in the company of a lover, throw her head back in laughter, beam over dinner, stroll contentedly in the park or dance into dawn.

Bliss montage review