When Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny” premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2003, unfinished and projected from a working Beta tape, the film was booed moments into the screening. Critic Roger Ebert sang a few bars of “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” to express his disapproval and later compared the film’s entertainment value to the pleasures of a colonoscopy video. The film gained notoriety as Cannes’ worst entry in its 57 year history, prompting its director to apologize to an assembled host of critics before waging a war of words with Ebert, demonizing the uber-critic as “a Fat Pig.” Ebert, in a paraphrase of Winston Churchill, insisted that one day he would be thin but that Gallo’s film would “still suck.”
Over a year later, Ebert has noticeably lost weight and Gallo’s film has finally been released in the U.S. in a shorter, more disciplined cut. Whether it “still sucks” will depend largely on the viewer’s sensibility and general tolerance for grainy verité filmmaking, but the finished 90 minute product is admirable and original in spite of occasional moments of awkward sincerity. In the spirit of John Cassavetes, who reveled in audience discomfort and once re-edited a film in reaction to a test audience’s positive response, Gallo has included one scene calculated to shock, an explicit act of fellatio on the actor-director by actress Chloe Sevigny. For that sequence alone, the film will not receive an MPAA rating. As a rule, most media outlets reject advertising from unrated films as a hedge against the promotion of “adult” material. In the case of “The Brown Bunny,” it may have no impact on what is already militantly un-commercial.
In June, I managed to see Gallo’s final cut in Paris. “The Brown Bunny” is neither as pretentious nor as tedious as expected, and manages to generate an atmosphere of rough and charming naiveté as well as several sequences of meditative power. The film opens with a lengthy, seemingly uninterrupted shot of a motorcycle race, after which Gallo, playing racer Bud Clay, begins a cross-country trip to California. Gallo appears much as he does in public: greasy, unkempt, menacing, and slightly epicene with a raspy, high-pitched voice. Haunted by memories of his lost love Daisy, Bud visits her parents in an unnamed eastern city, where he plays briefly with her pet bunny. A motif is born, recurring briefly in a pet shop as Bud questions the owner on a rabbit’s life span. When he replies that a new owner can expect five or six years, Bud questions whether “special food” might help.
The film captures Bud’s journey in all of its mundane detail: lengthy shots of highway through the van’s filthy windshield, meals at truck stops, showers, all captured in 16mm blown up impressively to 35mm. The climactic fellatio scene makes for uncomfortable viewing, disrupting the film’s contemplative tone and assaulting the viewer with an uneasy undercurrent of anger. The sequence belongs to a long line of unsuccessful attempts to fuse hardcore footage with mainstream cinema, from Bob Guccione’s notorious “Caligula” to more recent French imports such as Catherine Breillat’s “Romance,” and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi‘s “Baise Moi.” Those films wrapped their explicit imagery in intellectual posturing. Gallo is less high minded, but his unfortunate onscreen blowjob provides the same fatal distractions, at least to this American viewer. The French audience at the June screening was visibly unmoved.
French reviews of “The Brown Bunny” were generally positive, and in the May issue of “Cahiers du Cinema,” a list summarizing the opinions of ten critics awarded the film an average of three stars out of a possible four. French cinephiles have a notorious appetite for the work of American auteurs, and their ongoing affection for all things primitive and stateside were reflected in the same issue’s coverage of Sam Fuller’s 1980 war film “The Big Red One.” The article paid tribute to a lesser, late work by a favored director, offering the impression that the font of material for obligatory tributes to primitifs Américains is running desperately low.
On August 4, Vincent Gallo appeared at a Minneapolis screening of “The Brown Bunny,” which will finally open at the Lagoon Cinema on October 1. In person, he was thoughtful and articulate, if still energetic, far from his favored image as a greasy provocateur. He apparently reconciled with Roger Ebert over a three-hour dinner, and praised his former adversary as a “good, real” person who approves of the film’s most recent cut. Only two members of the audience walked out before the film’s end and several were in costume for the occasion, wearing motorcycle jackets and helmets in tribute to the wardrobe of Bud Clay. The Minneapolis audience was more vocal than the solemn Parisians, laughing at some of the earlier sequences as they adapted to the film’s uncertain tone.
On a second viewing, some of the mystique around Cannes’ “worst ever” entry had admittedly vanished. Vincent Gallo was not the oily firebrand of popular expectation, nor was his film the most outrageous salvo ever fired on the competitive battleground of independent cinema. It was an ambitious and occasionally sensitive film made for little money by a sincere young filmmaker with a hand held camera and mildly countercultural tastes, one of a thousand brown bunnies multiplying in the night. Still, the combination of enfants terribles, rabbit imagery, public outrage and high-minded European festivals now appears unstoppable: In a radical new performance of “Parsifal” at this year’s Bayreuth festival director Christoph Schliegensief brazenly substituted a pair of decomposing hares for Wagner’s descending dove. It was described as the worst production in the festival’s history.
© 2004 by Sten Johnson. All rights reserved.