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“Bubble” (USA/Magnolia Pictures/HDNet) is a 72-minute murder mystery; a low-budget oddity by Steven Soderbergh, on holiday from his often inconsequential, though highly commercial studio flicks, like the two-soon-to-be-three “Ocean” capers.
(At the end of January 2006, the trifling “Bubble” became one of the first films–like the come-and-gone “Noel” (2004)–to be released, simultaneously, on cable TV and DVD, as well as in theaters owned by its billionaire distributors and Soderbergh’s backers, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner. The release of “Bubble” is, clearly, a harbinger of American film distribution to come.)
“Bubble” concerns a homicide involving workers in a doll factory, located in a desolate border town between West Virginia and Ohio. Its color is reminiscent of the intense hues and the style of Errol Morris’ documentaries. It is acted entirely by non-professionals who improvise their own dialogue in order to flesh out Soderbergh’s thin plot line.
The film becomes a whodunit for only its last 20 minutes, after a young mother, Rose, the new, sexually attractive apex to a platonic love triangle, gets iced after her first date with her co-worker Kyle, a slim, attractive, but Tony Perkins-weird, high school drop-out. It seems that Kyle’s protector–a homely, middle-aged old maid, Martha–has become overly jealous of his attractive new sexual interest.
When it was over, the critics’ conversation around me rapidly dissolved into, “Why did Soderbergh perpetrate this very obvious whodunit at all?”
The picture has been skillfully shot and edited by Soderbergh in HDTV (although the Festival press saw a 35mm. print), and is decently acted by its cast of non-professionals. The overweight but redoubtable Debbie Doebereiner plays Martha, the kindly, veteran dollmaker who nurses her ailing father and gives rides and counsel to her impecunious co-worker, Kyle. (In real life, Ms. Doebereiner is a 24-year veteran manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken branch in West Virginia.)
There are three suspects in the strangulation murder of the vaguely attractive, 23-year old klepto, Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins), and the one ultimately convicted–you guessed it, Martha–cannot believe they could have lifted her prints from the neck of her strangled victim. (I didn’t know that could be done either.)
The blue pop-open eyes of the dolls and those of the murderer are revealed in an ingenious montage finale by Mr. Soderbergh. The obscure title, “Bubble,” whose meaning caused heated debate after the screening, refers to the type of round-headed dolls whose blue eyes snap open to the touch.

The author of “Bubble,” a woman named Coleman Hough, is a performance artist who previously wrote the obscure “Full Frontal” for Soderbergh. I fear their second little picture may meet the oblivion of their first.

The name Noah Baumbach was unknown to me despite the existence of his two previous, written and directed pictures, “Kicking and Screaming” (1995) and “Mr. Jealousy” (1998). Although I haven’t seen these comedies, I now want to.

Mr. Baumbach said that both of these films were apprentice works, made in his twenties, and that he hadn’t come into his own until now, at the age of 36, with his coming-of-age memoir, “The Squid and the Whale” (USA/ Samuel Goldwyn Films-Sony Pictures Entertainment).
This ruefully observed, painfully funny creation is Baumbach’s slightly hyped autobiography of growing up (in Brooklyn’s Park Slope circa 1986) to find his literary parents in the throes of a bitter divorce.
With this picture, Baumbach becomes as much a player in our cinema as his friend and colleague Wes Anderson, with whom he wrote “The Life Acquatic. . .” and the forthcoming “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” (Mr. Anderson is the lead producer of “The Squid,” although I greatly prefer Mr. Baumbach’s work.)
Stephen King, in his Entertainment Weekly column, in February, called “The Squid and the Whale” “the worst film title of all time.” Baumbach is aware that his title is a major turn-off, but it became an inevitable choice for him. It is, equally, as unforgettable as it is objectionable.
The title refers to a diorama at the Museum of Natural History, which frightened “The Squid’s” impressionable protagonist, Walt Berkman, as a boy. We get to view the sculpture, in all of its appalling glory, towards the end of the picture. (Walt is played by the gifted Jesse Eisenberg who made such an endearing debut, as the sexual naif in “Roger Dodger” (2002) opposite Campbell Scott.)
‘The Squid and the Whale’ exhibit becomes the symbolic equivalent of the struggle between Walt’s divorcing, competitively literary parents, which impels the 16-year-old Walt and his younger, 12-year-old brother, Frank (Owen Kline, Kevin’s son), to act out, alarmingly, at their high school.
Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels are typically wondrous as the sexually wayward, yet devoted parents of these traumatized sons, as are the lads Eisenberg and Kline. In support, William Baldwin plays an amiable but transgressing tennis pro. (The formerly dark and sleekly handsome Baldwin looks oddly puffy and curiously homely here, though he is also more amiable than usual.)
Baumbach’s script is surprisingly quirky and bitterly funny. He is a truly original writer, autobiographical, yet inventive enough to succeed at making the cliche of a dysfunctional family bloom again by his unusual wit.

Mr. Baumbach, a slender, aquiline-faced, Jewish man, whose bitterly divorced parents were both film critics, is also a gifted stand-up comic. That was demonstrated by his performance of his funny New Yorker piece, “My Dog is Tom Cruise,” concerning a certain Scientologist-actor’s summertime excesses. By his remarkable howls, yelps, and canine barks, Baumbach ignited the packed house in Town Hall, at a New Yorker Magazine Humor Panel on September 25. The satire of his offering put me in mind of Woody Allen’s funniest New Yorker pieces. I think that Noah Baumbach is, quite possibly, the Woodman’s logical successor as a filmmaker.

In February, Charlie Rose asked Baumbach about his next project. He said that it was a film he’d written about two sisters, to be played by Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Rose, never cognizant of show biz gossip, was clearly clueless as to Baumbach’s having recently wed Ms. Leigh, so he failed to pick up on the writer-director’s all-in-the-family casting.

Veteran French writer-director Philippe Garrel, faired less well than Baumbach with his Festival autobiography. Garrel’s “Regular Lovers” (France), (a literal translation, I believe, of the French for “going steady”), is yet another study of the unsuccessful youth revolt in Paris of May 1968, saluted recently by Bernardo Bertolucci in his flaccid, “The Dreamers” (2003), a not-so-hot, incestuous menage a trois.

M. Garrel was, oddly, voted Best Director for “Regular Lovers,” at last year’s Venice Film Festival, whose Golden Lion was awarded to Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.” I don’t find Garrel’s direction especially memorable compared to Lee’s, but at least they gave his picture the top prize.
As if to compete with Bertolucci on the ’68 student revolution, both “The Dreamers” and “Regular Lovers'” star Garrel’s handsome son, Louis Garrel, with his eloquent nose, mop of dark hair, and cheek moles. As Francois, a sometime poet and full-time draft-dodger and lay-about, the 22-year-old M. Garrel has become French cinema’s current cupcake–the successor to Jean-Pierre Leaud in playing turbulent young men. (I love Louis’ looks, but not his films.)

“Regular Lovers” is filmed in crisp black-and-white and runs just under three hours. Though it deals with such concerns of youth culture as sex, drugs, police harassment, as well as an unsuccessful revolution (shot cheaply), most of its scenes are as mellow as the hash or opium frequently ingested by the young ‘uns.
It’s mainly a placid picture of turbulent young people, most of whom I didn’t get to know, except for the wealthy addict who houses them at his vast Paris apartment, and keeps them toking from his ever-active hookahs.
The film’s white sub-titles were completely obliterated, when the lower part of the frame was bright, so that I missed at least 50% of the French dialogue or more. (I guess yellow titling clashes with a black and white print, but it does enable you to read the text.)

The film ends sadly with Francois’ lovely girlfriend (Clotilde Hesme) deserting him to sculpt in Brooklyn, which, as I never previously knew, was a hotbed of expatriate sculptors in its 1968 heyday, according to the film’s narration.
At the movie’s end, feeling desolate, Francois pops a lethal pill and goes bye-bye. I felt no remorse. (There’s a jokey commentary appended to this act, which, ambiguously, suggests that the overdose may have been accidental.) After three, fretful hours, I was, at last, freed from enduring the arctic chill of the theater wearing merely a short-sleeved shirt as an upper garment.
I did learn, the next day, from the Times’ critic, the ineffable Manohla Dargis, (whose taste is in her tuchis), that I had seen “a magnificent film” without my ever realizing it.
If Manohla likes something–she rhapsodized over Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days,” which had an extremely brief run in New York, despite her praise–I usually loathe it. In short, I find her views as peculiar as her name. I think she glories in films for the simple reason that they are protracted, ineffably dull, or are the pets of her pedantic, fellow intellectual film scholars. She joins those pretentious film connoisseurs Kent Jones and J. Hoberman on my list of les incroyables (the not-to-be-believed).

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