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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
There's an element of narcissism to "The Brown Bunny" -- perhaps inescapable in a movie where one person takes on so many tasks and appears alone on-screen for most of it. And Gallo's conception of Bud, a tortured, baby-macho loner familiar to us from other American road movies and from the Beats, has too much spiritual self-absorption to it. It's an invitation to make a show of the character's sensitivity and hurt feelings.
The movie doesn't drown in that, though. Finally, "The Brown Bunny" feels more self-effacing. In many of his close-ups Gallo is to the side of the screen, as if he's directing our attention less to him than to having us see what Bud is seeing. Often the camera is placed behind Gallo so we see only a few strands of his hair blowing into the frame. And there's no swagger in the performance. Gallo's speaking voice is soft and light, and there's frequently an element of pleading in it.
Gallo doesn't use Bud's encounters with those three women to show off his hero as a King of the Road stud. Bud doesn't do more than kiss these women, the lonely kind of kissing, the sort that comes more from a sudden, desperate need for contact than from erotic desire. (With the prostitute, he doesn't even do that -- Bud pays her to drive around with him for a while, eating takeout from McDonald's.)
There's no callousness in the film's treatment of women. You have to be some sort of a romantic to name all the female characters in your movie after flowers -- Violet, Lilly, Rose, Daisy -- and Gallo treats each of them tenderly. His few lines of dialogue with Anna Vareschi's teenage cashier have an unforced naturalness that's rare in movies. And there's something like gallantry in the way Gallo shoots Cheryl Tiegs.
"The Brown Bunny"
Written and directed by Vincent Gallo
Starring Vincent Gallo, Chloe Sevigny
Age lines are now visible in Tiegs' face. She hasn't done anything to hide them, and neither does Gallo. Yet there's no cruelty in the way he shoots her. Rather, there's Gallo's insistence that the reality of Tiegs is what he finds beautiful about her. You can wonder why, on a narrative level, this woman begins kissing Bud after he's done no more than ask if she's all right and sit next to her. But on an emotional level, the scene, like the rest of the movie, is direct and uncluttered. It's a vignette of temporarily assuaged loneliness that finds eloquence in actions rather than in dialogue and never comes near to bathos.
Gallo's direction is sometimes a bit shaky -- he's better at mining the poetic potential of images than in shaping a scene dramatically. That's a problem in the movie's longest sustained sequence, the hotel room encounter with Chloë Sevigny, as Bud's ex-girlfriend, that has made "The Brown Bunny" notorious. The tone wobbles a bit in this scene. It's the culmination of everything that's gone before, the key to Bud's character. The trouble is that it contains an O. Henry twist that jars the naturalism of the rest of the film, and the revelation is, psychologically, a bit pat. But Gallo and Sevigny (who has a resigned desperation) do what they can to ameliorate that patness, bringing it some admirable emotional messiness.
The fact that Sevigny performs (unsimulated) fellatio on Gallo in the scene has generated all the juvenile jokes you'd expect -- many from critics, who should know better. There's nothing gratuitous about the sex or the way it's shot. Gallo doesn't shy the camera away from Sevigny going down on Gallo, but he doesn't linger voyeuristically on it, either. The focus is the shared emotional history these two people are bringing to the moment, the way the sex is a means of holding that history at bay. And as soon as the sex is over, all that turmoil floods back in. This is one of the few movie scenes that doesn't use sex as a plot device or a turn-on but as what it often is in life, a charged vehicle for our disappointments and resentments as much as for our joys.
