Review of The Brown Bunny (2003) by Harry W — 07 Dec 2014

Famous for its notorious sexual nature as well as featuring the presence of Chloe Sevigny, I was eager to see The Brown Bunny to get insight into Vincent Gallo's filmmaking style and see if it lived up to the controversy.

The Brown Bunny goes for a melancholic angle. At first it seems interesting from an experimental perspective, but it really quickly becomes mind-numbing which causes the film to become a huge bore. The Brown Bunny is a film which goes from random dramatic scenes intended to explore the emptiness in the life of Bud Clay through simple silence and random shots of Vincent Gallo participating in minor activities to shots of him driving along the road while music plays. This is essentially the entire film. The Brown Bunny is that for a straight 93 minutes while viewers must attempt to decipher the overly subtle messages in the story. The only way I understood that Bud Clay was actually haunted by the memories of his former lover was by reading about it online. The fim itself was way too subtle for me to figure that out and too slow for me to actually care. Despite having potential, The Brown Bunny starts out as somewhat interesting and gradually dissolves into the pretentious bore that it cannot escape being. The Brown Bunny is clearly a film with the best intentions and experimental passion, but Vincent Gallo's vision does not actually transition to the screen all that well. The idea behind The Brown Bunny is a touching one which with the best meaning behind it and there are certainly elements that stayed with me for a while after seeing the film, but the way a film makes think is different to the overall experience. The fact that I thought about the final scene in the film shows that the film had promise and potential, but I enjoyed The Brown Bunny more after the slow ordeal of actually watching it was finished, and it doesn't take a genius to realise that this means it is a bad film.

As a whole, the film feels like an experimental student film stretched into 93 minutes. It is clearly an experimental arthouse feature, but it just feels so amateur. What really irks me is the fact that somehow this film ended up costing $10 million. This amateur production with many unknown actors somehow ended up costing a full $10 million when it barely looks like it cost more than $500,000. The question of where all that money went is one that I cannot help but ask. I kept my eye out in an attempt to answer that for myself, but there was never material which actually explained that to me. Nothing is explained in the film, most of it is strictly implied through the most subtle fashion available. How this film actually cost $10 million actually puzzles me because if there was a reality show dedicated to remaking The Brown Bunny with a smaller budget, I'm sure that people would be able to do it with less than $10,000 if they used the right connections. I don't know where all the money went, but the murky visual style of the film is not one of the places it went into.

The visual style of The Brown Bunny is truly unconventional. In a really arthouse fashion, The Brown Bunny is composed of shots which have a slightly blurry yet still clear visual aesthetic which remain in a single position for extensive periods of time with use of minimal editing. Like the overall film itslef , it had some quality potential at the beginning but eventually it just became overly simplistic. It gets dull and captures nothing but excessively simplistic really fast, like it was directed by a 1970's porno director. By massive coincidence, there is actually pornographic material featured in The Brown Bunny which makes this notion all the more noticable.

The Brown Bunny serves as notable for the one scene where Chloe Sevigny performs a fellatio on Vincent Gallo. Many people have called this exploitive, and it's not hard to see why. The scene is barely relevant to the film. Some people claim it shows Bud Clay in the one scene where he feels anything beyond melancholia, I'd say it was the only scene in the film that stuck out from the other 90 minutes of Vincent Gallo's other body parts and the long driving sequences. The entire film is a slow bore which makes this single moment the most memorable aspect of the film. It is hardly worth judging the entirety of The Brown Bunny based on this cene when it is actually the most entertaining scene in the film simply because it stimulates the viewers blood to run to their genitals after the rest of the boring qualities in the film have drained it from their brains so brutally. Still, it is irellevant to the rest of the film. Vincent Gallo can market The Brown Bunny as a film where Chloe Sevigny performs an actual fellatio on screen in a "legitimate" piece of cinema, but he still can not do enough marketing to make it an entertaining film. What Chloe Sevigny contributed to The Brown Bunny will give it more notoriety than Vincent Gallo ever could, and it is a shame because this scene damaged her career. I don't pin Vincent Gallo or Chloe Sevigny for their decision as it is unfair to judge either of them all on the basis of this one scene. The problem is with the rest of the film, and that is the simple fact.

The performances of the cast at least manage to add some level of benefit to the feature.

Vincent Gallo's performance is half-decent. For such a self-indulgent film, he actually pulls off a decent performance under his own stiff direction for the first half of the film. He projects a real sense of frailty, a sad sense of humane weakness into the role. The first half of The Brown Bunny shows some spirit in his acting abilities, but the material gradually challenges him less and less until it reaches a point of affecting her performance. When he has to act like he is crying he comes off as artificial because his face isn't seen and his voice sounds really corny and feels more like a whine than a cry. The focus on his character gets lost in the second half of the film which is a shame considering that he was good in the first half and he showed promise with how through subtle acting he can convey so much emotion and weakness. When things get heavier he proves not to be up to the challenge. His performance is of mixed quality, but what is clearly present is much potential and I applaud him for his efforts in some of the moments.

Chloe Sevigny is reduced to a very minimal period of screen time in The Brown Bunny which is a shame because I really like her as an actress. Still, in her scenes she acts like a guardian angel to Vincent Gallo and the emotional scenes that they share have her speaking in a monotonous but weak manner of voice which suggests there is something hiding behind her character. Chloe Sevigny has dull material to work with, but she is a welcome presence nevertheless.

So The Brown Bunny has the best intentions and some decent acting moments, but they are smothered beneath an overly slow pace and dull visual style which makes the film a pretentious tale of boredom.