It Came From Within

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT: Vincent Gallo and Chloé Sevigny get intimate.

Vincent Gallo may be a jerk, but The Brown Bunny is no jerk-off.

The Brown Bunny

by Sam Adams

Given that the only up-front title on The Brown Bunny reads "Written directed edited produced by Vincent Gallo," it doesn't take much effort to arrive at the conclusion that the movie might be, oh, just a shade narcissistic, especially when you consider that Gallo also stars in the movie and even photographed much of it. "My comfort zone was to control everything," he told reporters at Cannes. "In the future I hope to learn to work with other people in a more comfortable way."

Gallo, as every gossip-page reader knows, does not play well with others. Christina Ricci and Anjelica Huston, who acted in Gallo's directorial debut Buffalo '66, have made their dislike for him very public, while Gallo was reported to have wished colon cancer on Roger Ebert after he joined the chorus of anti-Bunny catcalls at Cannes in 2003. (Gallo, by way of defense, says he was aiming for his prostate.) In interviews, Gallo throws around words like "fags" and "spics," and has made a point of proclaiming his support for "our wonderful president" — not exactly the kind of talk likely to endear him to people who might consider seeing his movies.

The Brown Bunny is a narcissistic movie in the root sense, which is to say Vincent Gallo spends an awful lot of time looking at Vincent Gallo. As motorcycle racer Bud Clay, he sets off on a cross-country van ride from a New Hampshire racetrack to his home in Los Angeles, with the camera riding shotgun and inspecting his every pore for minutes at a time. But if The Brown Bunny is self-regarding, it isn't vain. It's not just that Gallo hasn't made himself up, or frequently looks as if he could use a shower and a cup of coffee. It's that often, when the camera trains on Gallo's face, it doesn't get the whole thing. His nose is cut off by the edge of the frame, or he's beheaded by the top. This will strike his detractors as so much artsy mucking about, but it's also an artistic form of self-mutilation, the most violent thing an actor can do to himself on screen. Shorn of its identifying characteristics, Gallo's face becomes an abstraction; the longer you stare at it, the less familiar it seems.

As Bud travels across the country, he has chance encounters with several women: a gas station attendant in New Hampshire (Anna Vareschi), a woman at a rest stop somewhere west of Ohio (Cheryl Tiegs), a young-looking prostitute (Elizabeth Blake) and, finally, Daisy (Chloé Sevigny), the girlfriend he left behind, or maybe it's the other way around. Not counting a brief stopover with Daisy's parents at her childhood home (right next door to Bud's) and some gearhead chatter with a few mechanics, that accounts for all of The Brown Bunny's dialogue, and most of its plot. The rest is Bud driving, or shots of the road as it flies past his windshield.

Like Bud himself, the women he meets are open wounds waiting to be probed — or, if you like, flowers waiting to be opened, since they're named Violet, Lilly and Rose. (Students of sophomore symbolism may wish to mount an in-depth study of Bud's full name.) Tiegs, who looks as if she just rolled out of a Dumpster, exchanges no more than a few words with Gallo before the two are desperately locking lips, while Vareschi's guileless gas-pumper succumbs to his pleas to come along on his trip, only to have him peel away from the curb when she runs inside to pack. He leaves Blake's prostitute on the side of the road as well, though not before she climbs into his van and commits an unspeakable act. (Not the one you've read about: She eats McDonald's while he watches.) The Brown Bunny's emotional landscape is as barren as the salt flats where Bud revs up his bike, racing into the distant emptiness.

To be sure, there's a lot of emptiness in The Brown Bunny, which would be more troubling if it weren't one of the year's most beautiful movies. Gallo loves film in a way few directors do, not just as a medium, but as a substance. The Brown Bunny's beauty isn't picturesque so much as it is textural; as in Neil Young's Greendale, some of the most captivating images are created by the limitations of Gallo's equipment — the flares as a reel of film runs out, or the brief flares of overexposure. The film's unbroken takes aren't elegantly composed tableaux whose richness is revealed on sustained viewing, but evacuated spaces that threaten to suck you in and never let go. Gallo has owned up to the influence of Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (though he more resembles the mute, damaged hero of Hellman's Cockfighter), but an equally strong influence might be Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle, which stretched a thin skin of fiction over a bottomless well of autobiographical despair.

The unlikely kinship between the feminist Akerman and the piggish Gallo brings us round to The Brown Bunny's most notorious scene, in which the movie's troublesome sexual politics come to a (wait for it) head. Bud visits Daisy's house in Los Angeles and finds it empty, so he leaves a note, and when she turns up in his motel room, they do what consenting adults, and actors, often do in such locales. That the act is not, to all appearances, simulated is of course significant, but hardly so scandalous that it should have eclipsed any discussion of the scene's import, to say nothing of the rest of the film. People's ears don't perk up when you tell them you've seen The Brown Bunny, but tell them you've seen the blowjob movie, and the floor is yours.

It's astonishingly depressing that more than a century after the invention of the moving picture camera, we're still so hung up on what is and isn't "real" on screen (as opposed to what's genuine, which is a far more important consideration). The fact that Gallo actually inserts Tab A into Slot B is important mainly because it makes it impossible to step away from a sexual encounter that is far more wrenching than it is titillating. As Bud gets what's coming to him, he starts to pepper Daisy with questions, which she answers as best she can with her mouth full: "You won't ever fuck any other guys, right?" is about the size of it. Sevigny's wordless moans belong to the key of need, not pleasure; her anguish is as insatiable as Bud's.

Though The Brown Bunny is as consciously "art" as a film can be, Gallo needlessly tacks on a final twist which overexplains, even trivializes, what's gone before. Bud's loneliness doesn't need motivation, especially since Gallo seems to believe it's his natural state. There's a lone-cowboy romanticism running neck and neck with The Brown Bunny's self-destructive side, as if Gallo loves the loner ideal, and hates what that love makes him do. Christina Ricci probably didn't mean it as a compliment when she called Buffalo '66 "the most beautiful example of self-absorption I've ever seen," but that's just what The Brown Bunny is.

The Brown Bunny Written and directed (etc.) by Vincent Gallo A Wellspring release Opens Friday at the Roxy

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