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Clip description
Bubby (Nicholas Hope) encounters a dog, a printing shop and a cake shop. In each place his senses are overwhelmed. When he mimics the sound of an upper-class woman (Celine O’Leary) in the cake shop, she takes him under her wing. In her car, he touches her breast – as he does with all the women he meets. Bubby’s mother never explained that this is not done. He has never ridden in a car before, but he has heard how young men in cars shout abuse, so that’s what he does when they stop at an intersection. A policeman doesn’t find it funny.
Curator’s notes
Nicholas Hope’s performance is quite astonishing in the role of Bubby. He was an unknown actor when de Heer saw him in a South Australian short film. This was his first feature and it was shot in sequence to help him achieve his performance. It’s an extremely difficult role to make credible – not just because Bubby is so childlike and pre-verbal, but also because we have to see the native intelligence beneath his lack of worldly knowledge. Hope manages to convey all this without becoming sentimental or cloying. A number of people have noted that the film bears some resemblance to the story of Kaspar Hauser, a German child who turned up on a street in Nuremberg in 1828. He could barely talk, although he appeared to be in his late teens. His story was turned into a film in 1974 by Werner Herzog (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), but de Heer has said he has never seen that film.
