Peek-o de Gallo
A poet and a hothead made the exquisite The Brown Bunny, and they're the same man
by Jeff Lambert
The Brown Bunny
Dir.: Vincent Gallo
X, 93 min.
Opening Friday at the Belcourt
The Brown Bunny is a fractured, tragic work of art. The sensitive, soulful Vincent Gallo made it. Loudmouth jerk Vincent Gallo handled its promotion. There are two Vincent Gallos. Just go to his Web site (www.vincentgallo.com) if you don't believe me. The front page features the two of them facing off, but you'd be hard pressed to figure out which is which. They are so bound together that it is hard to discuss one without the other, to suggest the poetic flow that The Brown Bunny rides without bringing up Roger Ebert's innards. Loudmouth Gallo cursed the critic's colon with cancer after Ebert declared the version screened at Cannes last year the worst film to ever grace the festival. Sensitive, soulful Gallo trimmed the film by 26 minutes and drove across the country showing the film to audiences, eventually converting Ebert into a supporter of his fragile road movie.
The Brown Bunny features Gallo as Bud Clay, a motorcyclist traveling to California for another race and to see a girl named Daisy. Bud seems sad, but we don't know why. On the way he encounters three women who, like Daisy, are named after flowers: Violet, Lilly and Rose. He also visits Daisy's parents' house and a pet store before arriving in L.A. Once there, he meets up with Daisy in his hotel room where she smokes crack and Bud's chub.
That bare-boned story is what Gallo uses to support his stylistic exploration of grief, masculinity and romantic longing. Gallo's got style, and he brings his considerable aesthetic sense to the film. The minimal camerawork meshes with film grain to capture the seemingly zoned-out Bud, like a wide-eyed character in a trance film. His encounters with others have an awkward quality, primal in their emotional starkness. "Please," Bud implores the convenience-store clerk Violet, when he asks her on the spot to hit the road with him. When Bud meets Lilly later at a rest stop, they start kissing passionately, the image of their hair filling the screen, a cavalcade of blond and black that transcends words and will be reprised later when Bud and Daisy reunite. Daisy's parents can't remember him, the guy at the pet store is forced to repeat the answer to how long bunnies live, and Bud's encounter with a hooker named Rose leaves her standing with a fistful of dollars and French fries. Bud remains sad.
Bud Clay enters the pantheon of melancholy road-movie heroes, from the triumvirate of driver/mechanic/GTO in Two-Lane Blacktop to Jack Nicholson picking up his Five Easy Pieces, or even Harry Dean Stanton rectifying past abuses in Paris, Texas. Gallo's sense of landscape and time carry Bud on a road even more minimal than those of Monte Hellman, Antonioni, and Wim Wenders, but the film remains compulsively watchable. Aesthetically The Brown Bunny lies somewhere between those arthouse auteurs and more avant-garde types like the James Benning of 11 x 14 or the Jon Jost of Last Chants for a Slow Dance. There is an emotional detachment to driving and travel that comes across in road movies; heroes take on the vibe of expressway existentialists. Gallo foregrounds this detachment and spins it out to reveal the rawness that lies behind Bud's tortured glances.
In 2001 Gallo released an album of music called When that contains a song called "Honey Bunny." Listening to this album and its sugar-laced lyrics ("Honey bunny / My baby girlfriend / Sweetheart / My sugar friend") prompted a friend to remark, "He is really corny, isn't he?" And you know what, he is corny. Gallo is looking for a way to express genuine unfiltered emotional states and in doing so leaves himself open to charges of mawkishness. This is where loudmouth Vincent comes in. Nobody suspects that this asshole, a notorious name-caller and bad boy, would be capable of producing works of such delicate sentiment. When sensitive Vincent bared his soul (and cock) to the audience at Cannes, loudmouth Vincent was looking out for him, shielding him from the critics and naysayers. There can't be one without the other, and once you get on his bipolar wavelength, you realize that ultimately he is an acerbically funny personality who also makes very sad, pretty things.
So when the notorious oral-sex scene happens with Bud and Daisy, loudmouth Vincent is there at first, untouchable, unlovable. But Chloe Sevigny invests Daisy with a sad-eyed honesty, desperately trying to connect. As the scene plays on, and Bud's emotional pain and shame are revealed, the polarities of his character subside—leaving the audience in the presence of a sad, corny man who has slowly painted one of the prettiest and most honest portraits of grief and loss possible.
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