Austrian filmmaker Valerie Blankenbyl made her doc The Bubble, about a vast Florida retirement complex, just as her parents were eyeing up their own retirement. The director tells BDE about octogenarian snogging, the political power that such an institution exerts as well as the new lease of life many of the residents feel they have been presented.
“We know we’re in a bubble but it’s a nice bubble,” one of the residents in The Villages, the world’s largest retirement community, comments early on in Valerie Blankenbyl’s new film (a world premiere in the international competition in Visions du Réel). There are 150,000 people living here, in a corner of Florida 45 minutes drive from Orlando. They may be elderly but they’re still having fun. They play golf, they swim, they drink, they flirt. Some even take belly dancing classes.
From one vantage point, The Villages community is close to Utopia for old folk. From another, it is cultish and even sinister, a self-enclosed community whose members tend to be ardent Trump supporters and who use up much of the area’s scarce resources.
Austrian director Blankenbyl had the original idea for The Bubble when considering the situation of her own parents. “My parents were retiring and I was just starting to think about how our world deals with retirement, how society deals with retirees and how, all of a sudden, from the experience of my parents, you become a person who is not asked their opinion very much anymore.”
Originally, the film was supposed to be set on a cruise ship. Blankenbyl even went on a research voyage. However, when the funding didn’t come through, she turned her attention to retirement communities instead.
“Basically, I realised these places were like big cruise ships. They have all the entertainment, the separation between inside and out, and the rules to live by that the ships have. I thought actually this is quite a good alternative.”
Much of the media reporting about The Villages has focused on the allegedly high rate of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) among the residents. Blankenbyl’s film downplays this aspect of the community.
“I felt that these reports were made by journalists younger than the people who live in The Villages and who are somehow shocked by the fact that people of a certain age are having sex, which I am not shocked about,” the director explains. “Maybe that is the difference between a European view and an American view. I am happy that they are having sex and I hope that I will be having sex at that age as well!”
There are obvious reasons why STD rates are high in retirement homes. The elderly lovers don’t use contraception because there is no danger of pregnancy. There are also a lot of newly single people. “You see a lot of night life. There are a lot of bars and places to dance. People do like drinking. You do see a lot of newly formed couples.”
In the early research phase, Blankenbyl met a man and woman in their early 80s who had recently hooked up. “They were just…snogging. I talked to them. They had been together for a month. They were just super-dooper in love. I met them a year later and they were still together. They were the cutest couple you can imagine.”
Nonetheless, the characters she foregrounds in the documentary are sceptical that sexual activity is quite as frantic as younger journalists have claimed. They would tell her “men would like to but can’t, and women don’t need to anymore.” Some pointed out, “there is only so much that little blue pill can do for you.” They suggested there was more talk about sex than actual real business under the blankets.
It would have been very easy either to caricature the eccentric old folk or to portray The Villages as a sinister cult. Although Blankenbyl brings plenty of humour to her film and doesn’t skimp from addressing the darker aspects of the community, she tries hard to be even-handed. Once she got over the more surreal aspects of life in the community, she realised that residents were simply doing the best to enjoy their remaining years of life. “They’re still really people who you get to know and like,” she says of her subjects. “When you’re there, you start to understand why people like it and why they feel comfortable.”
Characters who felt ostracised and isolated outside the community because of their age, appearance or health are suddenly able to thrive. As one resident obverses, the community isn’t a place where you come to die but somewhere that “will add 10 years to your life.”
What can’t be denied, though, is the political power the residents exert. There are 150,000 of them, all with votes. They can drive through policies that aren’t to the benefit of local inhabitants, many of whom have been living in the area for generations.
Security at The Villages is also heavy-handed. Blankenbyl and her team were sometimes harassed by overly zealous security guards even though they had permission to shoot on what was often public property anyway.
“You start uncovering things that you somehow wish you hadn’t. I never set out [to make] an investigative film at all but then you find out things that you don’t think you cannot talk about,” the director uses a flurry of double negatives to explain the less savoury side of the community. The immensely powerful, Republican-supporting billionaire Morse family who own The Villages are secretive and won’t tolerate dissent. They only give interviews to newspapers and media outlets that they themselves control.
“They’re constantly buying new land and increasing the space of The Villages and they’re definitely consciously displacing local population,” Blankenbyl notes. “I would have liked to interview them and hear their point of view but they’re very media-shy. They don’t appear in public unless they are in charge of the portrayal…it [The Villages} is the fastest growing municipal area in the US at the moment and barely anyone is writing about it.”
No, the director’s parents haven’t seen The Bubble yet. When Blankenbyl told her mother about the Florida retirement home, her mum responded, “that sounds amazing – when can I go?” However, she is enjoying her retirement in Vienna and Blankenbyl isn’t sure she’d like being as cut off from family as the residents often are in The Villages.
Blankenbyl shot The Bubble in 2019. Editing was slowed down by the pandemic but Deckert Distribution is handling world sales and its international roll-out is beginning in earnest now.
The film was made as a Swiss-Austrian co-production through Vienna-based Golden Girls Filmproduktion & Filmservices GmbH and Zurich-based Catpics.
