Bad Boy Bubby

Bubby has never been outside the apartment where he was born. At the age of 38 his mother is the only human being he has ever met. Bubby plays with cockroaches and a tormented stray cat. His fat incestuous mother looks after him until the day when his father turns up. The doors to the world outside are opened - a world filled with people, pizzas and trees. It doesn't matter who you are out there, it is what you look like that matters.

COMMENTARY
There is no way you can get past Rolf De Heer's Bad Boy Bubby, The film deals with confrontation, about how you go out into the world with open eyes, and the film has been shot to emphasize this too: with open eyes and as straight forwardly as possible. The content of the images defies style criticism, romantic and allegorical paraphrasing. A mother abusing her son sexually is portrayed in the act, on top of the son. The son's attempt at understanding breathing results in a dead cat wrapped in Cellophane. No bullshit.
The film is about Bubby, a man who has lived locked up with his mother for 38 years and who now confronts the world
like a tabula rasa, a blank page shaped by every encounter. Bad Boy Bubby is, desp'ite its brutality, very funny. Bubby's personality disorder has turned him into a human video camera: every reply he hears and every
action he witnesses is recorded in his consciousness and pops up again at some other, extremely unsuitable occasion. With infallible accuracy Bubby's recordings tear off the mask of the dishonest reality he is confronted with.
Bad Boy Bubby in the same way becomes both an attack on our media society and a song of praise to the opportunities of the same media to deliver the most tormented of souls. Bubby eventually finds a way of expressing both his inability to find his self and the horrors he has met and still meets in this, the darkest of worlds.
De Heer constantly confronts the audience with what they would rather not see, only to prove within the next moment that trolls really do burst in the sun. He knows that you have to balance on the verge of banality, tasteless brutality and heart-rending naivety to capture what only too many movies lack:
LIFE. ':'
Kerstin Gezelius