Bad Boy Bubby

Australian writer-director Rolf De Heer's 1993 semi-comic satire, Bad Boy Bubby, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for its sometimes savage vision of a modern society in which a Kaspar Hauser-like figure suddenly appears. Nicholas Hope is masterful as 35-year-old Bubby, who has been shut within his corpulent mother's airless apartment all his life, enduring sexual exploitation and mom's lies about the outside world being poisonous. When Bubby's estranged father turns up, the boy-man seizes an opportunity to flee, and embarks on a dark journey to encounter the unknown. De Heer keeps his innocent hero moving from situation to situation, like a great blank slate (think of Peter Sellers in Being There) absorbing and repeating whatever he sees and hears. Meanwhile, the people who meet him perceive exactly what they want to perceive. De Heer may be on a Swiftian mission to underscore humanity's corruption, but Hope is brilliant at the more subtle job of constructing, using few tools, Bubby's increasingly complex inner life. --Tom Keogh