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Is there another contemporary filmmaker whose work
swings as unpredictably between the seductive and
the alienating as does Steven Soderbergh’s?
Much is made, as it should be, of his switches between
big studio movies and frugal experimental indies.
But it’s the emotionally and aesthetically “bipolar”
nature of his oeuvre that’s more fascinating.
Bubble is the first of a projected series
of six quickies directed by Soderbergh and produced
by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s HDNet Films.
It was planned as the first test of Cuban and Wagner’s
well-hyped scheme to revolutionize film distribution
and exhibition by collapsing the windows between theatrical,
DVD, and pay-cable release so that movies open simultaneously
in all markets. One imagines that HDNet hoped to launch
their day-and-date concept with a film as irresistible
as Soderbergh’s 1989 debut, sex, lies, and
videotape, which effectively put American independent
film on the cultural map. Instead, the director, who
has been known to sidestep expectations, delivers
a disconcerting mix of neo-neorealism and tabloid
sensationalism.
Set in America-the-bleak, specifically Belpre, Ohio,
a town of some 6,500 inhabitants bordered on two sides
by about a dozen hazardous-waste sites, Bubble
concerns the thwarted romantic desire of Martha (Debbie
Doebereiner), a middle-aged, heavy-set, plain-faced
woman, for Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), a young, good-looking
co-worker in a doll factory on its last legs. Martha
believes she and Kyle have a special friendship, a
fantasy of which the passive Kyle seems unaware. When
Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins), a young, flirtatious, divorced
mom, joins the minuscule factory crew and puts the
moves on Kyle, Martha is immediately jealous. And
when Rose asks Martha to baby-sit while she goes out
on a date, and the date turns out to be with Kyle,
Rose feels humiliated and betrayed. The next day Rose
is found strangled, and Martha is arrested for her
murder. Did Martha, whose grip on reality is not that
firm, kill Rose during one of her periodic blackouts?
The police chief lays out the case against her persuasively
enough to convince even Martha herself of her guilt.
The film, however, leaves room for other conclusions.
Bubble—the title refers to an enclosed
consciousness that is not exclusive to inhabitants
of the Beltway, and perhaps also to the witches’
incantation in Macbeth, “Double, double,
toil and trouble”—is less a whodunit than
an experiment in confounding fact and fiction. Soderbergh
cast residents of the Belpre area who had no acting
experience, and they bring a verisimilitude to the
film that would be impossible to achieve with professional
actors. Which is to say that this familiar, tawdry
narrative gets a new lease on life, by virtue of the
awkwardness, the diffidence, and the emotional blockages
of these first-time actors, who are closer to Bresson’s
“models” than the cast members of reality
TV shows. It’s the opaqueness of Doebereiner’s
expression that makes us watch her. Something in her
eyes suggests she is so habituated to swallowing her
anger and grief that she doesn’t even know those
feelings exist in her. Soderbergh, who is cinematographer
and editor as well as director, lingers repeatedly
on Doebereiner in close-up as if he were probing a
wound or stubbornly waiting for a revelation that
is never going to come.
Shooting in Hi-Def, Soderbergh eschews the kinetic,
restless camera movement that had become his signature.
Here, the camera seems as stuck as the characters
in front of the lens. “I’m very ready
to get out of this area,” Rose says at one point.
“Why is that?” inquires Martha, as if
Rose’s desire to move was utterly foreign to
her. “Because there’s nothing here,”
replies Rose. The camera is unsparing in showing us
that nothingness—vast factories nearly emptied
of workers, houses as dark and flimsy as cheap motels.
For the record, although in income and education Belpre
ranks below the Ohio average, there have been no murders
in the town, at least not in the past two years.
© 2006 by Amy Taubin
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