Charlie Bubbles

The IMDB description "A married writer has an affair with his secretary" is about as accurate as saying the "Mona Lisa is a painting of some woman". I mean it's not wrong, but it is completely misinterpreting what the film Charlie Bubbles is about. Charlie does have an affair with his secretary, but it is just one scene to emphasize a plot point. The film is about trying to find meaning in life. My interpretation is that it is about unrequited desire to escape. To escape one's past, to escape from people judging you (the meeting of an old flame and her family in a café), to escape from guilt, to escape from people wanting money from you. To escape, but not having the will power to achieve it, resulting in little or no satisfaction with anything. Charlie Bubbles has achieved the sort of lifestyle all his friends and fans aspire to. He is rich but the money does not afford him happiness. He gets into funny japes with an old friend but that affords him little respite. Right at the start of the film his accountant suggests he moves abroad for a year to pay less tax, but Charlie asks why can't his company, instead of himself, register abroad? Charlie wants to get away but is bogged down by his inability to do it. He has a housekeeper who treats him more like she is his mother than an employee. Instead of just firing her he fantasies about shooting her. He cannot get rid of her because he fears the guilt that will come from it. There is a scene when he goes to a football match with his son. The excitement turns to boredom as neither father or son engage with each other or the game. They are just there because it's something to do. Similarly with the sex scene. He is having sex with a beautiful young carefree woman, but it affords him little satisfaction. Later, we can see he still has huge affection for his ex-wife but cannot muster the energy to win her back or become a full-time dad. Money is not a problem. It is inclination, the lack in the meaning in life, that is the issue. There was a telling scene when his old school friend is also stuck in the past, unwilling to move out of the town that is slowing dying economically speaking, but unlike Charlie Bubbles, he feels content. He knows his own mind and is happy with his lot. When he criticises the hedonistic lifestyle of London, Charlie does not defend it. He says nothing. He simply does not care enough to argue. At the end when Charlie is floating away in the balloon, that is the conclusion to his desire. He wants to just escape to anywhere, it does not matter where. Like his namesake he just wants to float free like a bubble, but he knows he cannot. He will sooner or later land, back to a past, back to a state of mind he cannot escape. I think is brilliant, it said so much with so little. Then again it could be a film about a rich man having an affair with his secretary. Keep up the good work IMDB person.

Who he is and who he used to be come together to guide who he believes he should be. The official feature debut of a megastar in the making has overshadowed the legacy that this film should have: for its leading title character (Albert Finney) and not for one of the supporting players, no matter how notable Liza Minnelli is. Finney, having gone from working class to upper middle, is divorced from Billie Whitelaw, and beginning an affair with Minnelli (his secretary) begins to ponder what his life really is about. Location footage and some closeups of real people on the streets gives a gritty realism to remind Finney of what his life could have been but doesn't seem to awaken him to anything but gloom. Given special "and introducing" credit for Liza bemoans the fact that she'd already won a Tony Award, performed with her mother on stage and TV and was considered a fashion icon. That's like saying that the film debuts of Mia Farrow and Barbra Streisand that year introduced them. There's no denial that Liza is a quirky but well deserved star, definitely fresh and a change of pace for the decade to come. It's hard to dish her no matter what she does as the effervescent person she is always pops through. Finney is understated, perhaps undirecting himself, but he's also focused with a weird style of editing that jumps into pieces of a situation, paraphrasing ten minutes of activity down to 30 seconds. Whitelaw gets a much more complex part, world weary and too tired to put up a fight, yet forced to remain "up" so she can take care of their son. Colin Blakeney is excellent too, but the film overall is one notch up from those kitchen sink dramas of a decade before that confuse reality for entertainment. The scene where Finney finds Liza's wig in his bed will have certain viewers in stitches.

This excellent film is about the effects of displacement, of being a fish out of water. Working-class Charlie Bubbles has ascended from his humble origins to become a successful writer. He has clearly not handled the transition well from within, but it's hardly surprising when there are so many hurdles to overcome in the world outside of himself. The story would have been familiar to a lot of people in Britain in the 60s, as the first generation to benefit from the post-WW2 welfare state came to adulthood. CHARLIE BUBBLES nails this more effectively than any other film I know. Playwright Shelagh (A TASTE OF HONEY) Delaney's script is full of acute observation; the acting is marvellous, the cinematography (by a young Peter Suschitzky, now better known as David Cronenberg's DOP) noticeably European, the charming score (by Misha Donat - Mr Suschitzky's sister) a nod to to the work of Georges Delerue and Nino Rota. Indeed, the movie as a whole leans more towards New Wave and Fellini than the realistic school in which Finney made his name as an actor. Here he is also the director - his one and only feature film in that capacity - and a very creditable achievement it is too. How CHARLIE BUBBLES reads to people unfamiliar with its social and historical background, I don't know. For me it is one of the finest British films of the sixties, but it somehow gets overlooked in the enthusiasm for THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER, A KIND OF LOVING and of course Saturday NIGHT AND Sunday MORNING. They are all fine films, but so is this one. Re-assessment in its favour is long overdue.

A few unwelcome scatological moments of surreal humour not withstanding, Albert Finney's only film as a director, "Charlie Bubbles", remains both a remarkable period piece and one of the most imaginative British films of the sixties, perhaps not the masterpiece I first thought it to be, (it was my best film of the year), but unmissable nevertheless. Finney made it in 1968, from an original screenplay by Shelagh Delaney, a time when the Kitchen Sink was no longer fashionable and a new kind of New Wave, typified by films like Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's "Performance" and Richard Lester's "Petulia", was coming into play. This is certainly good enough to make you wish Finney had directed again. He plays a working-class writer who has made it big, (he drives a Rolls and his books have been turned into films), and the film is set over the weekend he drives North and back to his roots with his unofficial secretary in tow, (a very good, if unlikely, Liza Minnelli), to see his nine year old son, (a first-rate Timothy Garland), who lives on a farm with Charlie's ex-wife, (a terrific Billie Whitelaw). Not much happens and at times Delaney's screenplay is a little too Pinteresque for its own good, but it's also a richly observant picture of Britain at a particular moment in time and is greatly enhanced by the superb cinematography of Peter Suschitzky.

I think it's a classic existentialist movie, very much of the European school. Man can never be truly happy or satisfied, with what he's got or with what he gets even if all his ambitions and dreams come true.I think Albert Finney has done an amazing job. It takes true guts and real skill to make a film like this and 'get life' out of it without resorting to fist fights, car chases and shootouts. I love the small moments, like where he puts the eyelashes on his sons lip to make a 'moustache', or when his wife takes the tea cup and his acting when he reaches for it. Billie Whitelaw looks super-sexy in the film and her performance is beautiful. Her gaze at him when he's tucked in bed said more than a million lines of dialogue could. I wish Mr Finney had directed more films, if his debut as a director was this good, imagine what would have come after a few more films. Aah we'll never know...

Interesting but ultimately unmoving drama (with quirks) has the title-named character, a rich writer who lives in plushy comfort, unable to get over his guilt of having money. When Charlie visits his Northern haunts, where the streets are filled with potholes and the surroundings match the sky--all in gray--we wonder, "Why is he so obsessed with his early poverty?" and "Why can't he get on with his life?" Director-star Albert Finney doesn't give us much to go on (or maybe you have to be British to understand the symbols inherent in British society) and most of his film feels like a put-on. Liza Minnelli has a small part as an American secretary, and she occasionally pushes her kooky "Americanisms" too far; however, though the role isn't much, Minnelli has a strange, slightly zonked/slightly exotic presence, and when she performs in a low-key she's appealing. As Mrs. Bubbles, Billie Whitelaw got most of the acclaim, but it's Liza we remember. As for the much-talked about finale, I thought it profound in its fantastic way, but, like the rest of "Charlie Bubbles", it exists to please and understand itself, leaving the rest of us on the outside looking in. ** from ****

Alfred Hitchcock said that "movies are life with the boring parts taken out." Perhaps he did not see "Charlie Bubbles." While this film seeks to show the shallowness of a rich upper class life it actually shows the shallowness of movies about boredom. The main character is supposed to be a well read author. This writer never writes anything; the viewer is free to make what they will of his blank stares at the world around him. Is he thinking some deep thoughts? Who knows? There is a kind of documentary feel about the film. Not a good documentary feel. They had all the elements of a good movie here, good acting, enough money to move around, adequate technical skills...yet nothing seems to happen. The main character is bored, the actors are bored, and the audience ends up being bored. As I watched this dreary parade of life's humdrum problems unfold episode after episode I wondered how the plot would resolve the situation. When Charlie woke up one morning and looked out the bedroom window to see a hot air balloon I knew the film was over. Any viewer who did not realize the end was near was alerted by the happy-go-lucky music on the soundtrack as Charlie rushed to the balloon to end this tedious film. While some might view this laborious work as a question about the 'meaning of life' others might well ask, "Why make such a long film if you have nothing to say?" (p.s. Liza Minnelli may have started drinking after watching her big seduction scene in this film.)

source: Charlie Bubbles

Trailer—Charlie Bubbles

Charlie Bubbles