The Brown Bunny begins with a motorcycle race. The racers swirl around the track, their bikes roaring and humming in and out of the film's soundtrack. Bud Clay (Vincent Gallo), the focal point of this beautiful, masterful film, does not win the race. Instead, he packs up his bike into a rundown van and heads back to his home of Los Angeles, where he is to race yet again. On the way, he meets up with a series of interesting, mysterious woman, young and old, with whom he has fractured, sometimes mesmerizing, always momentary, encounters.

The Brown Bunny, the legendary (for all the wrong reasons) second film by writer-director-editor-producer-etc., Gallo, is a meditative, heartbreaking exploration of isolation, loneliness and loss. Gallo's film, notorious for its non-simulated oral sex act by Chloe Sevigny, is perhaps the most misunderstood American film since Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Gallo's film has been accused of being an infantile, sophomoric attempt at cheap titillation, but that's an inept reading of both the film and its creator's intentions. The Brown Bunny is unusually moving, unusual because its seemingly non-narrative structure suggests a more obtuse purpose. Gallo's film is oblique, to be sure, but its purpose never seems in doubt: to present the journey of a man so hurt and broken by love and its complications that he no longer recognizes affection when he sees it.

As an actor, Gallo has always been an anomaly. He can be moving, even bracing, when given the proper material (he's amazing in Abel Ferrara's The Funeral and in Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day). He can also phone it in when it seems as if he knows (or feels) that he's above the material (Hide and Seek, Truth or Consequences N.M.). Often he appears to be merely playing Vincent Gallo. His persona, so prevalent in interviews and public appearances (his tiff with Roger Ebert's at last year's Cannes Film Festival is the stuff of legend, though they both say it was blown out of proportion), can be bombastic, overshadowing his talents.

His directorial debut, Buffalo 66 (which I consider to be the best film of the 1990s), was a breath of fresh air from the American independent film scene at the time of its release. His squirmy, nervous performance was wondrous, his talents as a filmmaker more than promising…they were revelatory.

Now comes the more troubling The Brown Bunny, troubling because it's almost impossible to sell to modern American audiences. It is non-narrative, non-linear. It is a vanity project with almost no commercial appeal. It features pornographic interactions between recognizable, if not famous, Hollywood actors. This is what everyone knows about The Brown Bunny.

What does not seem to be mentioned very often in reviews of the film is how moving it is. For all the photogenic posturing of the creator and star, and for all the hoopla surrounding the film's controversial denouement, The Brown Bunny would settle for a little bit of understanding, I think.

Gallo's film is meditative in a sense, the anti-road movie. Bud Clay is traveling across America, but he's really getting nowhere. His encounters with females, disastrous as they may be, speak of a more broad sense of defeat. Here is a broken man, a man torn apart by something in his past (something so horrific, it is jarring and powerful when revealed at the film's end). Bud is a shell of a man of promise (whom we glimpse in some extremely brief, but oh-so-telling, flashbacks of a happier, contended Bud).

The Brown Bunny is the story of Bud's journey towards a realization, albeit one that may be the ruin of him. His meeting with the love of his life, Daisy (a rapturous Chloe Sevigny) is what everyone's talking about…but for all the wrong reasons. This is a moment of revelation more striking and surprising than that of any recent "thriller". To discuss it too much would be to rob the film of its quiet power. But Bud is faced with several ghosts from his past and forced to confront a devastating truth, one that neither he, nor the audience, may be prepared to deal with.

Gallo's technical skills are as impressive as ever. Though the film's pacing is minimalist, its images are painterly and expressive. The Brown Bunny is one of the loveliest visual poems of America that the cinema has ever known.

I can only hope that time will be kind to this masterful film, because The Brown Bunny, moving, revelatory, devastating, deserves to be remembered for being great, not being "controversial".

                                                                 © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004