BAD BOY BUBBY

BAD BOY BUBBY (Directed by Rolf De Heer. Starring Nicholas Hope, Claire Benito, Ralph Cotteril, Carmel Johnson, Sid Brisbane)

Bubby is a low budget, bad taste Forrest Gump with attitude. Life certainly ain’t no box of chocolates for our hero, unless we’re talking about cockroach flavoured ones. We are introduced to the 35 year old innocent, who has been confined to a dingy room all his life by his incestuous, tyrannical mother in a genuinely grotesque opening fifteen minutes that hardly gives a hint of the pleasures to follow.

Bubby is no holy fool, he’s an underdeveloped, fucked up victim of abuse, as naively capable of cruelty as a child pulling wings off a fly, but equally likely to respond to kindness with his own innate goodness. When events finally unleash him from his tiny universe, he embarks on an engagingly funny, occasionally appalling odyssey through an outside world every bit as strange as his inner one. Where Gump’s innocence constantly rewards him, Bubby’s misadventures are not quite so wholesome. There is murder, rape, appalling cruelty to animals and all manner of abuse, yet somehow De Heer maintains a sense of humour and optimism. When Bubby is adopted by a counter-culture rock group and hilariously lauded by an audience who lap up Bubby’s litany of abusive phrases learned from his mother, he makes a far more convincing icon of society’s freaks and outsiders than genuine pretenders like Henry Rollins.

Director Rolf De Heer employs imaginative devices to create an otherworldly mood. The minutely detailed, disconcertingly personal sound was recorded on two tiny microphones attached to the lead actor, so everything we hear is essentially subjective, while a different cameraman is used for each new location (31 in all) lending the film a bizzarely shifting visual style.

At times Bad Boy Bubby veers into chaos, but it is largely held together by an exceptional central performance from newcomer Nicholas Hope. Despite a bubbling under-current of anger about society’s attitudes to the mentally and physically handicapped, and a barely restrained rage at what De Heer perceives as the evils of organised religion, Bad Boy Bubby’s truly peculiar humour makes it about the strangest feelgood experience of the year.