BAD BOY BUBBY
A film review by Phil Herring
Copyright 1994 Phil Herring
Writer: Rolph De Heer
Director: Rolph De Heer
Actors: Nicholas Hope
Carmel Johnson
Claire Benito
The theme of a person locked away for their entire life, and then by chance released into the wide world, has been explored fairly often in the past (BEING THERE and THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER spring to mind), and they generally fall into two categories: either the person will succeed in the experience, or the world will destroy them.
But in the low-budget Australian film BAD BOY BUBBY, this is not really the main issue. The person who is imprisoned is Bubby, kept locked up for 35 years by his abusive mother in a filthy basement flat. He is, to all intents and purposes, an infant. Then one day he seizes his freedom, and escapes into the black night of the industrial suburbs of Adelaide. The rest is part adventure, part tragedy, and part comedy. It's also very intense, confronting and discomforting. Bubby is the target of hatred, charity, loathing and love, and this emotional roller coaster closely parallels the experience of the audience, who are subjected to black, ironic humour mixed with images that openly defy the conventions of commercial cinema.
And despite the well-worn theme, the film manages to keep you in your seat. It doesn't have the usual monotonic form of a mainstream film (an opening exposition, followed by a steady, direct run to a clear resolution); instead, it vacillates between joy and despair. Bubby has good days and bad days; the audience gets to ride up and down with him.
And despite his naivete and inability to cope, at no point does Bubby become pathetic. In the end, he is resilient, and the audience sees him grow up very quickly without losing his identity. This, in spite of all the cruelty that he experiences and inflicts.
And the visual imagery in the film is amazing. It is almost wholly bleak, dark, and at times positively Hogarthian, with a lot of attention paid to the texture of dirty skin, the sagging of folds of fat, the dull fall of artificial light, and the patina of used, worn surfaces. It's a visual experience that you can also feel and smell, and it's both repellent and oddly appealing. The dark visuals add directly to the film's black humour; both Bubby and his new-found world are, in places, very, very funny in their cruelty and stupidity.
It must be said, though, that not everybody will enjoy this film. It's probably unconventional enough to discomfort most viewers, and the first forty minutes are set in a tiny, claustrophobic space, and are quite difficult to watch at times; plus the film directly addresses the matter of what is beautiful, and the way that women are used in movies. (Not in any overt way, mind you; it's just there if you want to look for it.) And on the subject of sex, this film has a lot of it, and it's quite explicit, but the way it operates on the viewer is subtle and strange. It isn't simple eroticism.
There is also the matter of the final resolution, which I found somewhat disappointing; on the other hand, I think that it was unavoidable, given where the film was going. Some of the acting is also a tad uninspired, possibly because those actors weren't experienced.
In summary, this low-budget film is an amazing experience; its good points overwhelm its flaws, and I can only say that it's thoroughly watchable, and probably headed for a cult following.
-- Phil.
(c) 1994 Rev. Dr. Phil Herring ph@cs.uow.edu.au - Church of the Sacred Dial Tone, Wollongong, Australia - Permission is hereby granted to: 1. quote the original material in this article when posting responses to it via Usenet or when sending responses to myself or others via electronic mail; and 2. copy the entire article intact via Usenet for the purposes of transmitting the article to other Usenet sites. All other reproduction of this article constitutes a breach of copyright laws and will be subject to both civil and criminal action.
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