The Brown Bunny



by Shari L. Rosenblum

Hyperbolically dismissed at Cannes, cut by a much resented quarter, and resurrected into lukewarm possibility by the public's fascination with graphic sexuality, The Brown Bunny is too tame for the tsking and too unsubstantial for the fatwas. But it does have its gut-punch. No one captures the essence of loneliness -- and regret -- quite like Vincent Gallo.  

Artist/model/actor/exhibitionist - solipsist by nature or design, Gallo -- who wrote, directed, produced and stars in the film -- creates a cinematic language from his very own self-sense, feeding on his narcissism, and burrowing into the silences of the soul's gaping emptiness. He gets to the heart of loneliness -- what Joseph Conrad called the naked terror -- a truth unexpurgated. It is a volatile substance, and Gallo indulges it with unabashed vulnerability. (There's something about Gordon Lightfoot singing in the background.) In his first film, Buffalo '66, Gallo worked from the same raw matter, threading his (character's) self-perception through an irreverently sardonic distortion and a female curative. The critics found the treatment tedious and misogynistic -- I thought its onanistic mournfulness finely balanced by a comic, irreverent, self-mocking, life-affirming, and love-affirming touch. The Brown Bunny, as they say, not so much. But it is compelling, just the same, in the off-handed, almost indefensible way that Gallo -- scrawny, greasy-haired, and apparently inconsolate - is.

With a film style that works backwards from homage to imitation (the 60s and 70s, minimalism and alienation, Easy Rider to Two Lane Blacktop), and lighting effects that wash out and obscure more than they illuminate, The Brown Bunny is perhaps most remarkable for its unapologetic self-obsession.   Alternatingly masturbatory and existential, Gallo's camera tracks a relentlessly self-referential road trip through emotional desolation. He is Bud Clay, the name self-consciously, but unsuccessfully, evocative, making his way across the land to a woman named Daisy (Chloë Sevigny) and what was or might have been. The metaphors abound, but weakly. Bud races in circles, aimlessly: no focus, no win, and then moves through a studied barrenness, east to west: insistently floral imagery, like the titular bunny, the promise of a fertility unrealized.  

The landscape that unfolds before him -- through bug-splattered windshield -- wordlessly parallels, perhaps too obviously, an inner path that spirals infinitely back through its own consciousness, alienated, yet grasping, untouchable but in communion with its own aching hunger to be released. Women dot his way back home -- Daisy's mom, a roadside clerk named Violet, a weathered beauty named Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs, as an extension of the 70s iconography, decomposed, recomposed), a streetwalker named Rose -- all as much reflections of his neediness as projections of his destiny, or destination. But he is almost always in the frame, to the left or to the right, his profile or the back of his head a focal point, if not the center of the image -- reaching out, received, and then recoiling from each encounter -- and each redundant stretch of road that follows after.

By the time we get to Calfornia, it becomes clear that the end of the journey may not rightly be the end of the road. Daisy -- dressed in retro 70s attire -- is both more and less than we might anticipate, and the climactic scene -- erotic in ways one does not admit to -- conveys a panoply of sexual sublimations: tenderness and fragility (can I touch you, she asks), power and domination, urgency and frustration, anger and regret (I hate you, he says). Loneliness engorging him, engulfing him, swallowing him up whole, Gallo's hollow man faces the shadow between the desire and the spasm, the potency and the existence, the essence and the descent, and the film's world closes with a sort of banging whimper. Sevigny manages to disappear into her own daring act. The scene is neither necessary nor unnecessary to the film; it just is. A detraction only to the extent that it takes the viewer out of the narrative and into his or her own viewing consciousness (Is that really him? Is that really happening? What was she thinking? Am I really watching this?).  

The film resolves as a study in images - the actors, like the infamous act, symbols in their way, asked to do very little, and not necessarily to persuade or convince. Even Gallo himself becomes embodiment rather than enactment of his guiding theme, a visual echo of John Cheever's poignant portraiture of loneliness: "A stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind."

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
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