More Sex, Drugs and Weirdness from Vincent Gallo
The Brown Bunny, 2003, 93 minutes, Unrated
By Ryan Hernández
Vincent Gallo wrote, directed, edited and starred in this film notorious for its graphic sex scene and universal panning at the Cannes Film Festival. However, when considered as an experimental supplement to his previous work, its potency is undeniable. Images of a loner talking to disinterested parents, a desperate need for love met with an inability to consummate the physical act call to mind Buffalo 66. The opening shot of Gallo’s motorcycle (number a 77) is a sort of wink to the viewer that this is a continuation of thematic material. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a professional motorcyclist, constantly in motion literally going around in circles. Like every character in the film he is named after a plant, and not surprisingly he is arrested in his development.
The Brown Bunny must be assessed as a movie within a movie, the first a boring six-day road trip cross country, and the second, a single scene of rich emotion, externalized introspection found beneath the surface of the otherwise unremarkable Clay. The real movie takes place at the end of his journey in a Los Angeles hotel room where Gallo is joined by actress Chloe Sevigny. The other sixty minutes amount to nothing but filler, even when the brief and brilliant appearance by 1970s supermodel Cheryl Tiegs is considered. Small tidbits of character development may be gleaned but the bounty of the final private fantasy is much richer. The film has almost no interest in narrative structure and one could easily set the DVD player to random chapter selection without detriment.
The film’s title comes from a pet bunny kept by Sevigny’s character, Daisy Lemon, since she was a little girl and which has survived far beyond the normal five-year life span. So it is with Bud’s memory of her: despite her rape, overdose and the death of their child, he remains in love with her. Another brown bunny is mentioned briefly in the dialogue: a chocolate once given as a gift from Bud to Daisy, which is eaten so voraciously that it is vomited immediately. Thus, The Brown Bunny is a story of love sickness.
At the time of release, the film’s detractors dismissed it as a celebrity-sex-tape intentionally leaked to the public, or else labeled Gallo a misogynist for having depicted a character receiving a blowjob while simultaneously cursing the performer. In fact, the scene is nothing more than a man blaming himself for his lover’s own capriciousness. Critics were well aware that Gallo and Sevigny were off-screen lovers, but were simply too uncomfortable with themselves to watch real people having real sex. Insistence that Film be taxonomized as either soft-core-paperback-romance or hardcore-pornography is extremely narrow-minded. The reason is obvious: love and sex are not always nice and happy; they’re frequently gut-wrenching.
In fairness to those who hated this film, even this cinephile was knocked on his ass by Chloe Sevigny’s on-screen smoking of crack cocaine. She, like Gallo, seemed to be invoking a career-establishing performance, namely Jennie, the character she played in Kids who was raped while passed out.
The film is simply too long to merit the 60 minutes of road-tripping and should have been shelved. What exists is good, but only as a short film. The film breaks from other avant-garde filmmakers like those of the Dogme 95 collective by its use of music. There is an actual soundtrack and the songs that occur on the freeway drives are not the Christian evangelism or country music one would expect to find in middle-America; they are impositions reflecting the mood of the character, not the locations.
Ultimately, the film is neither a total failure nor total success, just an honest experiment in vanguard cinema.
