The Bubble is an enthralling deep-dive into the oddly surreal – and also rather worrying – area of Florida called simply ‘The Villages’, the fastest growing “town’ in the US that will soon be four times the size of Manhattan and is currently home to some 155,000 retired folk who have headed south for a laid back bubble of fun in the sun.
Austrian filmmaker Valerie Blankenbyl and her team meet more than a little resistance from the owners of The Villages as they try and film within the beautifully maintained town squares (despite having permission from county officials and the police departments), but these brief moments of conflict are balanced by insightful interviewers with a handful of residents, as well as Florida locals who live outside the bubble but have to maintain a relationship with an operation that brings in a lot of money to the region.
Screening in International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Reel, the English-language documentary The Bubble is an engrossing watch. Its insight into the Trump-supporting community is ripe for sale to platforms as well as a shoe-in at other festivals, and while there are of course comparisons with Lance Oppenheim’s Sundance 2020 film Some Kind of Heaven, which also focussed on The Villages, it remains a fascinating subject matter with plenty of room for debate and discussion.
With its 54 golf courses, 70 swimming pools, scores of pickle ball courts, leafy walkways and a matrix of interweaving roads very much designed for golf carts, this age-restricted community is naturally popular with an ageing population who feel they have served their time at the work coalface, want to keep active and are looking for full time sunshine.
It was originally founded by Michigan businessman Howard Schwartz, who set up a mobile home park in the early 1970s called Orange Blossom Gardens. After he began to buy more tracts of land in nearby Sumner and Marion counties development began in earnest, and in 1992 his son H. Gary Morse officially changed the name of the project to The Villages. The operation is still family-controlled.
The residents talk happily about the easy-going lifestyle and the simple fact that because you are surrounded by older folk there is never the sense of truly feeling ‘old’. Toni, a resident for 17 years and a lover of the regular karaoke sessions, admits there is a pressure to keep trim and look good, but for others it is about having a drink, playing golf and spending time on the gun range.
Linda, who lives outside The Villages, runs the Nordic Gun and Pawn shop, and admits some 75% of her business is with “Village people.” As she says: ”It is a kind of a bubble, but it is a nice one.” She also amusingly admits this area of Florida is now about “planting Yankees and not watermelons.”
The notion that the residents live in a bubble is reinforced by the fact that the owners control their own media which naturally offer a positive spin on all things Village. They run the Villages Daily Sun newspaper, the Villages News Network (VNN) and the radio station WVLG, a Fox News Radio affiliate.
Valerie Blankenbyl and her team largely keep a respectful distance and never try to be confrontational with the Villages officials, instead relying on wry and ironic visuals to make the point about the strange and worrying nature of the community. Interviews with locals outside the bubble who are fighting to stop land being bought offer context, while the fact that the Villages community is largely white and Republican is highlighted with interviews with members of a nearby Baptist church which maintains a graveyard right next to Villages housing. There are also concerns about the sinking water-table and increasing number of sinkholes, perhaps due to the massive amount of water The Villages uses to maintain golf courses and green areas.
There is a niggling sense that the film could have been harder hitting and delve more deeply into other areas (sex, crime, alcoholism etc are all ripe for investigation), but at heart this clever film is not aiming to rip the lid off The Villages, but rather to astutely point out its inconsistences and contradictions. Amusingly the film signs off with a scene of Villages karaoke, as a man with a great voice sings a PG-rated version of Creep by Radiohead…the irony of the chorus “But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doin’ here? I don’t belong here” hits the spot quite perfectly, though whether the audience pick up on that irony is not clear.
Switzerland-Austria, 2021, 92mins
Dir/scr: Valerie Blankenbyl
Production: Catpics, Golden Girls Filmproduktion, Schweirzerische Radio-und-Fernsehgesellschaft
International sales: Deckert Distribution
Producers: Rajko Jazbec, Dario Schoch
Cinematography: Joe Berger
Editor: Nela Marki
Music: Adam Lukas
