THE BROWN BUNNY
It’s a masterpiece.
You may remember the film acquiring some notoriety at Cannes in 2003, when Ebert called it the “worst movie in the history of the festival” and compared it unfavorably to his colonoscopy. (And really, could you ask for a better metric for the quality of a movie-going experience than its similarity to an invasive rectal exam?)
Ebert later backed down, when Gallo cut some of the extensive footage of a black van driving off into the horizon and added footage of Chloe Sevigny sucking on his cock like she expects candy to come out. Without having seen the Cannes version, this seems like a wise editorial decision. But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of screen-time devoted to Gallo driving through mid-western suburbs and down mid-western highways, and driving at night, and in the rain. Driving into the sunset? You better believe there’s footage of driving into the sunset.
Your appreciation of this movie will depend in part on how high your tolerance for Sensitive Vincent Gallo is. There’s a video he made, (for a song that he also wrote and performed himself, of course), called “Honey Bunny,” and it features hot, semi-nude women rotating on a stool, in various suggestive poses. The video ends with a close-up of sensitive, bearded Vincent Gallo, weeping sensitively. He just loves women so darned much! (You can watch the video at Sputnik7; it’s quite amusing.)
Brown Bunny is very similar. Like Honey Bunny, it’s a self-indulgent expression of male guilt, but it also happens to be brilliant. Vincent Gallo portrays a sensitive, tortured motorcycle racer named Bud Clay, driving to Los Angeles from somewhere east of Chicago. Along the way he has sort of hallucinatory, context-free encounters with various women. For example, a young convenience store clerk flirts with Gallo, who responds by asking her to come to California with him. She sensibly replied “I don’t even know you, Mister.” Gallo begs pitifully, “please come with me? please?… please?… please?… please?… please?… please?” She finally says “okay,” and then, while she’s packing her bags, Gallo drives off alone.
The film embodies an aesthetic and dramatic minimalism; the viewer has plenty of space to reflect on the few gestures each scene contains. The various stops along the way to Los Angeles, (the young store clerk, visiting Sevigny’s parents, tenderly kissing a woman at a truck stop, being propositioned by whores, etc.), contain almost no action and very little dialogue, resembling scenes from memory or daydreams, inert and internal. The word “daydreams” is wrong; it makes them sound trivial or fanciful, which these scenes are not. They all contain a sense of desperation, of fraudulence and disappointment, which culminate in Clay facing his dreadful failure as a human being. It’s honest and unflinching and not very sexy.
I wrote a few more paragraphs, contrasting this film with Gus van Sant’s Last Days, but Blogger ate them and now I can’t be bothered. They contained great erudition and critical savvy, I assure you, but now they are gone forever thanks to a unrecognized object in Blogger’s python code. Personally, I always preferred Perl.