If you follow entertainment news with any regularity, you’re probably already familiar with The Brown Bunny. Last year it caused an uproar at Cannes with its graphic three-minute sequence of writer-producer-director-cinematographer-editor-star Vincent Gallo being hungrily fellated by Chloe Sevigny. The filmmaker subsequently got into a highly publicized feud with Roger Ebert, who had called The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of the festival. And last month community outcry in Los Angeles forced the removal of a 60-foot billboard over Sunset Boulevard that offered a more oblique image of Sevigny going down on Gallo. The billboard advertised the film as being rated X, a classification long ago discarded by the Motion Picture Association of America (in fact the film is unrated) but still embraced by the porn industry.
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Now The Brown Bunny has finally been released into the commercial desert of late summer, 26 minutes shorter than it was at Cannes but with every frame of its notorious fellatio scene intact. Considered on its own terms, it turns out to be an interesting but not entirely successful combination of road movie, landscape film, and psychological drama. Gallo plays an alienated motorcycle racer who finishes a contest in New Hampshire, loads his Honda RS250 into his van, and heads west for a race in Los Angeles, stopping to visit his ex-girlfriend’s parents, inspect some rabbits at a pet store, and do his Marlon Brando routine for three different women (including 70s swimsuit goddess Cheryl Tiegs). For much of the film’s first two thirds Gallo simply points the camera through his bug-splattered windshield and lets the midwestern terrain cast its hypnotic spell. Only in the last third, when he gets down to the business of telling a story, does The Brown Bunny become a porn movie—though not in the sense you’d expect.
Only the vaguest story line emerges during all this. In one scene Bud returns to his hometown and visits Daisy’s parents. Though he grew up in the house next door, Daisy’s mother doesn’t remember him; she hasn’t heard from Daisy in a while, and neither has he, despite his claim that they live together in Los Angeles. Daisy pops up a couple times in fleeting flashbacks as Bud nears LA, and once he’s arrived in town and checked into a hotel, he leaves a note on her door (here a neighbor doesn’t recognize him, so apparently the line about them living together was bunk). Back in his hotel room she finally materializes, disappears into the bathroom a couple times to smoke crack, and reminisces about the time he bought her a chocolate bunny and she wolfed the whole thing down, making herself sick. Before long she’s on her knees, wolfing him down, and Bud is hissing accusations at her.
Written and directed by Vincent Gallo
With Gallo, Chloe Sevigny, Cheryl Tiegs, Elizabeth Blake, Anna Vareschi, and Mary Morasky.
