Suspending your disbelief is a requirement for viewing “Bubble & Squeak,” writer-director Evan Twohy’s directorial debut. A couple honeymooning in a country that bans cabbage doesn’t exactly scream romance — and there is none here. Because before Declan and Delores (Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg, Emmy-nominated actors from “Station Eleven” and “Barry,” respectively) can even begin celebrating their nuptials — the culmination of a long courtship where they felt more compelled to buy a house together than to say “I do”— they are detained in customs.
When an agent (a wacky performance by Steven Yeun, who also produced the film) informs them of their crime of smuggling contraband cabbage into the country, Declan is flabbergasted; he cannot fathom why anyone would put cabbage in their pants to go on vacation. The problem, however, is that Delores has done just that.
Cabbage, it turns out, is banned in this unnamed Slavic country because of its critical role in the nation’s collective trauma. Smuggling it carries a hefty price: large sums of money, dismemberment and maybe even death. Refusing to wait idly for the worst the agent’s boss, Shazbor (Matt Berry), may administer, Declan makes a break for it into the forest with Delores reluctantly tagging along.
As they struggle to find their way out of the forest and hopefully back home in the United States, they encounter Norman (Dave Franco), an actual cabbage smuggler who protects himself by posing as one of the country’s treasured bears. Delores’ fascination with the stranger digs up deeper marital problems that become dramatically undeniable by film’s end. Ultimately, Declan is a straight, play-by-the-book guy who doesn’t yearn for anything other than the usual, while Delores longs for adventure and excitement. And in real life, while opposites may attract, they don’t often mix.
Taking “Bubble & Squeak” at face value is impossible. Twohy has knowingly crafted a work of absurdism that is about a whole lot more than cabbages. The writer-director, who has been developing this story for two decades in various forms, including a play, uses Declan and Delores to question how people stay together long after it’s evident that they are no longer on the same page and, like Declan and Delores, they literally can’t see the forest for the trees.
Filmed in Estonia and named for an English cabbage-and-potatoes dish, “Bubble & Squeak” mockingly invokes images of well-known fables. Forests are particularly prominent in fairytales. So setting “Bubbles & Squeak” in a forest is far more than coincidence. There’s a reason why Twohy sets the film in a forest, a common fairytale setting, and gives it a fanciful look and fills it with a lively production design that often, curiously appears both bright and dim. In some ways, the cinematography provokes neither a glass-half-full or half-empty look and feel. Instead, it sort of lays in limbo.
Those expecting straight-ahead laughs or linear storytelling will be out of luck with “Bubble & Squeak,” because those are the furthest things from Twohy’s intention. Instead, he is posing philosophical questions around love and marriage that frankly will require many viewers to shed the beliefs they’ve ingested since childhood to even entertain his perspective. To some, “Bubble & Squeak” will be bold and ambitious; to most, it will be trite and dry.
