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Movie Review: The Brown Bunny

It’s not pornography. Pornography has a point.

by A. Rosenbloom | 2004.09.02

Why is Bud Clay so sad? This is the question that lurks through Vincent Gallo’s latest exercise in self-admiration, The Brown Bunny. When that question is finally answered after 93 agonizing minutes of poorly framed and out of focus filmmaking, the viewer feels less fulfilled, and more like the victim of a cruel joke. Gallo has used the controversy of his new film to almost dare people to sit through its entirety with the promise of something shocking at the end, and because cinephiles are suckers for things they haven’t seen before, we all fall for it.

Clay is a motorcycle rider who, after losing a race on the east coast, must drive to Los Angeles to race again and to reconcile with his lost love, Daisy; played in flashbacks and apparitions by Chloe Sevigny. Along the drive, he eats, pumps gas, showers, uses restrooms, and passes American landmarks, all in boring real time home video style. Occasionally he will speak with people, but it is rare and uninteresting. He first visits Daisy’s parents, to whom he was a childhood neighbor, but for some reason have no recollection of him or his relationship with their daughter. The scene lacks all the tension and nervousness one would expect from such a meeting, and it also lacks all of the strange cleverness exhibited by a similar scene in Gallo’s previous film, Buffalo ’66. He also meets several other girls along the way, all of them (cleverly, or not) with flower names; Rose, Lilly and Violet. He bonds in strange ways with these women, but is so haunted by Daisy, he cannot connect with any of them. When he finally does make it to California, after visiting the house he once shared with Daisy he forces us to endure a lengthy motorcycle diagnostic test before retiring to a motel room for the remainder of the film. Here he confronts Daisy in the film’s notorious scene of actual oral sex performed by Ms. Sevigny. It is also here that we see, with Clay, the sad truth of why Daisy haunts his thoughts.

The film has been called many things since its world premiere, but unfortunately, it is more boring and uninteresting than anything else. It cannot be pornography, because as Gallo himself has said, the purpose of pornography is to arouse its’ viewers. The jury is still out on the purpose of The Brown Bunny, and I fear that outside of an experiment by one of art’s most self-indulgent enfant terribles, one does not exist. Ms. Sevigny must be commended for giving herself to the film the way she does. She does, on screen, what no other recognizable actress has done in the history of cinema, and even if the reasons are misguided, or if she has become an object in Gallo’s vision, her bravery is undeniable.

Gallo himself must be appreciated for experimenting with cinematic conventions, but it would have been nice had he done so with proper lighting, and camera work so that the constant soft focus and under exposure of the film were not distracting. As the credits proudly display, the film has been written, directed, produced, edited, and photographed by Gallo. He also claims to have acted as the film’s sound recorder and camera operator. He collaborated with the brilliant cinematographer Lance Acord and the editor Curtiss Clayton (To Die For, Drugstore Cowboy) to wonderful results on Buffalo 66, and one wonders why he decided to fix what was not broken. As a result, he has created a film that has the potential to offend and enrage, but unfortunately, is little more than a spectacular waste of time.

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