The Brown Bunny

Two things have made Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny infamous, and neither one has much to do with the experience of watching the movie.

(1) On its first screening at Cannes, the audience loathed the movie. Walk-outs were common, critics vocally complained afterwards; Roger Ebert went so far as to call The Brown Bunny the worst film ever to screen at the Cannes Film Festival. This caused Gallo to publicly wish colon cancer on Roger Ebert, which he then proceeded to announce that he already had.

(2) Gallo's ex-girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, blows him on-screen at the end of the film.

I can't really imagine why the film was so poorly received at first. Granted, the version they saw at Cannes was about 20 minutes longer than the version I saw, which arrives today on DVD. Granted as well, the movie is quite slow, dull even, and includes a lot of extended shots of mundanity seemingly designed to tire the audience.

But still...Cannes attendees have got to be among the more patient audiences around. I mean, we're not talking about a Saturday matinee at the Universal CityWalk here...this is a film-literate group, right?

I can imagine why an on-screen blowjob demanded some attention. It's surprising to see a footage of a semi-famous actress with a penis in her mouth. (Now, a famous heiress with a penis in her mouth...that's not at all surprising to see.)



But how is the movie?

It's pretty good, actually. Well, allow me to temper that. It's pretty not at all bad. Misguided, yes, and as I said, occasionally quite dull. The film opens with a steady several-minute-long shot of a motorcycle race, but it's shot from such a distance away, we can't really tell one rider from the other. We can tell there is something dramatic happening, but we lack the ability to see through the muddle and figure out exactly what it is.

This is Gallo's entire concept with the film. He wants to show us moments from the life of a very sad man, but withholds the key to understanding his sadness until the very, very end. Usually, if a movie wants to save some sort of tragic backstory until the end, as a surprise, it will at least give you hints as to what's in store.

Brown Bunny takes a different tack. Motorcycle racer Bud Clay (Gallo) finishes up with the race in New Hampshire and heads in his van for California. The road trip will take the entire length of the film. He stops a few times along the way, talking to girls and trying to win them over. It works a few times, but then he always takes off after proving to himself that he can still win someone's affection. He reveals nothing of himself to either these women or to the audience.

Until the end, when he winds up in that motel room with Chloe Sevigny. It's a peculiar double-moment: we're seeing the sex scene, the much-discussed blowjob, but we're simultaneously seeing the explanation for Bud's behavior through the whole movie.

And this moment is where the film lost me. Because the explanation (which I won't reveal here) isn't terribly satisfying. I suppose this is maybe the point - Clay's behavior seems meaningful, deep to us, before we know what his problem is. We can always sympathize with random ennui, the general malaise associated with modern life so often in art house cinema.

But when you find out what specific action caused this sadness, it stops being poetic angst and becomes, well, a story about a bummed out guy who's still not over a recent tragedy. The movie suddenly makes more sense, but it loses the one thing that made it stand out - it's ambiguity.

Still, this hardly qualifies it as the worst film ever to screen at the Cannes Film Festival. I know from Overnight that Troy Duffy brought his film Boondock Saints to Cannes. I don't know if it played in actual competition, but it's far far stupider than Brown Bunny.