Verdict
Summary
Deaf Crocodile recently released this film to Blu-ray, and it is lovingly presented in a restored fashion for the first time in North America. They’ve included a wealth of bonus animated shorts by the filmmaker, plus a booklet, a new essay, a commentary, and more. Deaf Crocodile has become the elite distributor of mostly unknown or “lost” animated films from around the world, and I’m here for it.
Plot:
On the eve of his wedding, a 40 year-old husband-to-be has second thoughts.
Review:
At 40, a Hungarian Bohemian window dresser named Zsolt is having second thoughts about his upcoming marriage to a self-absorbed woman. The wedding is to take place tomorrow, and he is having what might be described as a nervous breakdown, but without all the drama. He drives around the city and ends up at the apartment his fiancé shares with a roommate, Aniko, a buxom wallflower who has long held a crush on Zsolt, but it is her roommate who is the lucky one with a more “classic” beauty. Speaking of the bride-to-be, she is spending the day out, getting her wedding gown fitted and expressing to anyone who would listen to her that she has her entire future life with Zsolt planned out to the day. She already knows exactly how many children she will have, how much maternity leave she’ll get (which she calculates will add up to 15 years!), and how she’ll cheat the system of marriage and motherhood to her advantage, which she surely has already spoken about to Zsolt, which might be the reason he’s out cruising for a sympathetic ear on the eve of his wedding to her. With Aniko, he has not just sympathy, but a sort of simpatico and love, and suddenly over the course of the afternoon he realizes that this is the woman he wants and desires, and not the woman who has already mapped out their entire lives, down to the day. Is Zsolt man enough to choose the right woman before it’s too late?
A truly oddball animated film for hardcore animation connoisseurs, the Hungarian-made Bubble Bath is almost a stream-of-consciousness Cheech and Chong-type pothead dream state of a film. A meandering narrative structure filled with psychedelic imagery (think Yellow Submarine), the film is also a musical, and the songs (in Hungarian) are a blend of funk and disco, and at least one of them has a catchy hook to it. Sort of sexy, but mostly just weird and bizarre, the animation has a flow and rhythm to it that is unique and regional. Filmmaker Gyorgy Kovasznai (whose sole film this was before passing away a few years later) seemed to have based this film on his own life and experiences, and so the movie has a personal quality that is impossible to ignore.
Deaf Crocodile recently released this film to Blu-ray, and it is lovingly presented in a restored fashion for the first time in North America. They’ve included a wealth of bonus animated shorts by the filmmaker, plus a booklet, a new essay, a commentary, and more. Deaf Crocodile has become the elite distributor of mostly unknown or “lost” animated films from around the world, and I’m here for it.
