While Bad Boy Bubby has undeniable comic elements, it is disturbing, provocative and challenging in style. The film, made by Dutch-born Australian Rolf de Heer, had a major impact at the last Venice Film Festival, where it was premièred.Bubby has grown up in a dingy suburban two-room apartment without windows. His world ends at the four walls; his mother has brought him up in complete isolation from the outside world. Father left long ago and Bubby has an incestuous relationship with his reli-fanatical mother. She only ventures out occasionally and then only wearing a gas mask to protect herself against the outside world which she regards as noxious.This strange existence comes to an abrupt end when Bubby’s father, a drunken priest dressed in rags, suddenly turns up. He soon replaces Bubby in mother’s bed and that makes the son jealous. Bubby gets frustrated and that has to lead to a violent outburst: hardly aware of what he is doing, he suffocates his parents with cellophane and heads out into the world for the first time. He meets ‘normal’ people and does his best, by copying gestures and learning new expressions, to adapt to his new surroundings. To express Bubby’s disorientation in the new world, De Heer uses no less that
