The Brown Bunny
The Brown Bunny is a 2003 experimental road drama film written, directed, produced, photographed and edited by Vincent Gallo. Starring Gallo and Chloë Sevigny, it tells the story of a motorcycle racer on a cross-country drive who is haunted by memories of his former lover. It was photographed with handheld 16 mm cameras in various locations throughout the United States, including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Ohio, Missouri, Utah, Nevada, and California.
Following its world premiere at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, the film garnered a great deal of media attention because of the explicit final scene between Gallo and Sevigny, as well as a feud between Gallo and the film critic Roger Ebert, who stated that The Brown Bunny was the worst film in the history of Cannes, although he later gave a re-edited version his signature "thumbs up".
Plot
Motorcycle racer Bud Clay undertakes a cross-country drive, following a race in New Hampshire, in order to participate in a race in California. All the while he is haunted by memories of his former lover, Daisy. On his journey he meets three women, but Bud seems to be a lost soul, and he is unable to form an emotional connection with any of them. He first meets Violet at a gas station in New Hampshire and convinces her to join him on his trip. They stop at her home in order to get her clothes, but he drives off as soon as she enters the house.Bud's next stop is the home of Daisy's parents, the location of Daisy's brown bunny. Daisy's mother does not remember Bud, who grew up in the house next door, nor does she remember having visited Bud and Daisy in California. Next, Bud stops at a pet shelter, where he asks about the life expectancy of rabbits. At a highway rest stop, he meets a distressed woman, Lilly. He comforts and kisses her, before starting to cry and eventually leaving her. Bud appears more distressed as the road trip continues, crying as he drives. He stops at the Bonneville Speedway to race his motorcycle. In Las Vegas, he drives around prostitutes on street corners, before deciding to ask one of them, Rose, to join him for a lunch. She eats McDonald's food in his truck until he stops, pays her, and leaves her back on the street.
After having his motorcycle checked in a Los Angeles garage, Bud stops at Daisy's house, which appears abandoned. He leaves a note on the door frame, after sitting in his truck in the driveway remembering about kissing Daisy in this place, and checks in at a hotel. Daisy eventually appears there. She seems nervous, going to the bathroom twice to smoke crack cocaine, while Bud waits for her, sitting on his bed. As she proposes to go out to buy something to drink, Bud tells her that, because of what happened the last time they saw each other, he does not drink anymore.
They have an argument about Daisy kissing other men. At this point, Bud undresses Daisy and she fellates him. Once done, he insults her as they lie in bed, talking about what happened during their last meeting. Bud continuously asks Daisy why she had been involved with some men at a party. She explains that she was just being friendly and wanted to smoke marijuana with them. Bud becomes upset because Daisy was pregnant and it transpires that the baby died as a result of what happened at this party.
Through flashback scenes, the viewer understands that Daisy was raped at the party, a scene witnessed by Bud, who did not intervene. Daisy asks Bud why he did not help her, and his feelings of guilt on this are considerable. He tells her that he did not know what to do, and so he decided to leave the party. After he came back a bit later, he saw an ambulance in front of the house and Daisy explains to Bud that she is dead, having passed out prior to the rape and then choked to death on her own vomit. Bud awakens the next morning, alone; his encounter with Daisy turns out to have been a figment of his imagination. The movie ends as Bud is driving his truck in California.
Cast
- Vincent Gallo as Bud Clay
- Chloë Sevigny as Daisy
- Cheryl Tiegs as Lilly
- Elizabeth Blake as Rose
- Anna Vareschi as Violet
- Mary Morasky as Mrs. Lemon
Production and release
The version of the film shown in the U.S. has been cut by about 25 minutes compared to the version shown at Cannes, removing a large part of the initial scene at the race track, about six minutes of music and black screen at the end of the film, and about seven minutes of driving before the scene in the Bonneville Speedway.
Neither Anna Vareschi nor Elizabeth Blake, both in the film, were professional actresses. Kirsten Dunst and Winona Ryder were both attached to the project but left. In an interview from The Guardian Sevigny said of the sex scene: "It was tough, the toughest thing I've ever done, but Vincent was very sensitized to my needs, very gentle.... And we'd been intimate in the past."
For the film's promotion, a trailer was released featuring a split screen in the style of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, depicting on one side of the screen a single point-of-view-shot of a driver on a country road, and the other side various scenes from the end of the film featuring Chloë Sevigny. Both sides of the screen had no audio tracks attached, although the song "Milk and Honey" by folk singer Jackson C. Frank played over the trailer's duration.
Controversy
Cannes reception and reviews
The film was entered into the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.Upon his return to the US, Gallo took a defiant stance, defending the film and finishing a new edit that clarified and tightened the storyline. A war of words then erupted between Gallo and film critic Roger Ebert, with Ebert writing that The Brown Bunny was the worst film in the history of Cannes, and Gallo retorting by calling Ebert a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader." Paraphrasing a statement attributed to Winston Churchill, Ebert responded with, "It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny." Gallo then claimed to have put a hex on Ebert's colon, cursing the critic with cancer. In response, Ebert quipped that watching a video of his colonoscopy had been more entertaining than watching The Brown Bunny. Gallo subsequently stated that the hex had actually been placed on Ebert's prostate and that he had intended the comment to be a joke which was mistakenly taken seriously by a journalist. He also conceded to finding Ebert's colonoscopy comment to be an amusing comeback.
A shorter, re-edited version of the film played later in 2003 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The new version was regarded more highly by some, even Ebert, who gave the new cut three stars out of a possible four. On the August 28, 2004 episode of the television show Ebert & Roeper, Ebert gave the new version of the film a "thumbs up" rating. In a column published about the same time, Ebert reported that he and Gallo had made peace. According to Ebert:
In 2018 however, Gallo rebuked Ebert's statement, calling it "both far-fetched and an outright lie." He went on to state the final cut was only 8 minutes shorter than the Cannes cut, not 26 as Ebert claimed. According to Gallo "If you didn’t like the unfinished film at Cannes, you didn’t like the finished film, and vice versa," going on to speculate that Ebert wanted to distance himself from "a brutal, dismissive review of a film that other, more serious critics eventually felt differently about."
Nevertheless, The Brown Bunny still received mixed reviews from other critics and has a rating of 46% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 94 reviews with an average score of 5.17/10. The site's consensus states "More dull than hypnotic, The Brown Bunny is a pretentious and self-indulgent bore." Metacritic gives the film a score of 51 out of 100 based on reviews from 30 critics.
French cinema magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma voted The Brown Bunny one of the ten best films of 2004. The film won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Vienna International Film Festival for its "bold exploration of yearning and grief and for its radical departure from dominant tendencies in current American filmmaking". The film, aside from the feud with Roger Ebert, gained some positive reaction from American critics as well. Neva Chonin of the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a somber poem of a film sure to frustrate those who prefer resolution to ambiguity... like an inscrutably bad dream, lingers on". The film was praised by other filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, John Waters, Sean Penn, and Werner Herzog who called it "the best portrayal of the particular loneliness a man feels."
The Daily Telegraph listed The Brown Bunny as one of the 100 "defining" films of the decade, calling it the decade's "most reviled" film, but saying it was "destined to become a future lost classic".
Sevigny's response
In August 2004 upon the film's limited theatrical release in the United States, star Sevigny took to defending the film and its final scene, stating:Right before the film's Cannes premiere, the William Morris Agency had dropped her as a client. A source there reportedly said, "The scene was one step above pornography, and not a very big one. William Morris now feels that her career is tainted and may never recover, especially after rumors began circulating about the even more graphic outtakes that didn't make it into the actual film."
Despite the negative backlash toward Sevigny's involvement in the film, some critics praised her decision. New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis said:
Seven years later, in an interview for Playboys January 2011 issue, Sevigny talked about the oral sex scene in the film: