Cinematic Wanderings
By Luke Mindell

Will Bubble Burst The Industry?

Bubble, the new film by Sex, Lies, and Video Tape, and Ocean’s 11 director Steven Soderbergh, is causing quite a stir in the film industry. Bubble is the first film to have a virtually simultaneous release in theatres, on DVD, and on pay-per-view television.

Some believe that if the style of release becomes prevalent, it will put movie theatres out of business. At least one theatre chain has refused to show Bubble. To me, there is something far more interesting going on in this film; Bubble has no professional actors.

The film tells the story of three people who work in a doll-factory. As the film opens, a middle-aged woman picks up her twenty-something co-worker and they carpool to work. The factory is eerie, doted with piles of what appear to be baby limbs and monstrous baby-head molds. The young man pours skin colored plastic into a large machine, and then yanks eyeless heads out with a pair of metal tongs. In the next room, the older woman forces eyeballs into the heads with her thumbs.

The characters clearly find their work uninteresting, but the camera examines the factory with great interest. After all, this is a factory that manufactures fake infants from scratch, and Soderbergh fully examines the visual bizarreness of the situation.

As I mentioned, the actors are not professionals, and when the young man and older woman have lunch together, their conversations, the way the talk, even the way the eat their fast-food lunches seem as authentic as acting ever gets. Even when they screw up a line or appear to become self-conscious for a moment, it feels like real people stammering and not being sure of them selves.

At a svelte seventy-two minutes, the plot moves faster than the audience expects, keeping you in a perpetual state of surprise, even at the most mundane developments. The film takes its first turn with the introduction of a pretty young girl who joins the staff at the factory. It is immediately clear that the young man is interested in the new girl, and that the older woman is not pleased. She takes on a motherly role, giving rides to her young co-workers, and clearly resenting it.

It might not sound like it so far, but Bubble is in reality, a murder mystery. When of the three main characters ends up dead, and I wont tell you which one, the film becomes as gripping as any whodunit I’ve seen.

At this point a new character takes over the film. He is the homicide detective assigned to the case, and calling him a character seems somewhat inaccurate, seeing as he is a real life homicide detective. His performance is astounding, because it really isn’t a performance; it’s a professional detective doing what he does everyday, this time the murder just happens to be a fake.

The way he handles the scene of the crime, talks to other officers, and interviews suspects seems so real, that I got the impression that he may have told the writer what he should say rather than the opposite. Soderbergh described, in an interview on public radio, how he filmed the interrogation scene. They left the interviewee in an interrogation room alone; not knowing when filming would start. The detective then burst in several minutes later and begins the questioning.

Soderbergh isn’t the first filmmaker to use non-actors in a film, but after seeing Bubble, I think I prefer them to professionals.

All though Bubble came to theatres at the same time it hit movie stores and television, I opted to rent the DVD. I should mention however, that I work at a movie store and get my rentals free, and Bubble didn’t even come to any Vermont theatres. You don’t need to see this film on a giant screen, but any film with that is strongly visual will still be mandatory theater viewing. I can’t imagine watching big budget eye candy films, or the occasional beautiful black and white film exclusively on a small screen.

Weather this film will affect the industry, I don’t know, though I guess it won’t. All I know is that Bubble is a subtle, fascinatingly preformed, utterly engrossing film.