The great Lenny Bruce once explained that there was a distinct difference between "A piece of art with a little shit in the middle" and "a big piece of shit with a little art in the middle." If you are looking for an example of the latter, than you need look no further than this film. Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny is quite possibly the worst film I've ever seen. To describe it as amateurish would be to denigrate the hard work and enthusiasm that hobbyists and semi-pros bring to their creations. The film fails in every aspect. The cinematography is terrible, the acting is stiff (no pun intended), the dialog is pathetic (what there is of it) and the story itself is a joke. And it is so pretentious, so self-consciously arty that it can't even be considered good-bad in that Ed Wood way; it's just plain bad.

The film opens with a long sequence of Gallo in a motorcycle race; it must go on for about ten minutes, unaccompanied by music or dialog. This is not promising stuff to begin with, moreover the distant and unsteady camera work on the scene makes it that much harder to bear.

After Gallo loses the race, he goes to a gas station and convinces the young girl working there (I'm guessing between 15 and 17) named Violet to come with him on a road trip to California. He drives her to her place to get her things, then drives off as she goes inside. This establishes the pattern for the film; the next sequence is fifteen minutes or so of footage of Gallo driving his van across the country, mostly accompanied by the ambient sounds of the road except for a few moments with some folk music that seems startling after the long silence. Then another little vignette, then another long stretch of Gallo driving--ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Gallo's character Bud keeps running into women named after flowers and having aimless interactions with them. It comes out that Bud has a lost love named Daisy that he is still haunted by. Finally he makes it to Los Angeles where he leaves a note for her on the door of the house where they used to live together.

Some more uncomfortable minutes pass, and then Daisy (Chloe Sevigny) shows up at Bud's hotel. They have a weird interaction, with Bud being all moody and full of recrimination over seeing her again. Daisy goes in and out of the bathroom to smoke crack cocaine. Then she performs oral sex on him, graphically in front of the camera. This is the part of the movie you may have heard about, and even though it is something other than erotic it is the only thing worth watching in the film. Gallo is a greasy looking individual, but there is a certain fascination in finding out that he is hung like a horse. As for Chloe, I've always thought she looks pretty good naked, though again the camera work does neither her nor us any favors here.

The final twist comes when we see a flashback to the end of Bud & Daisy's relationship. It turns out that Daisy passed out at a party after smoking crack and was gang-raped. If that isn't bad enough, it turns out that she then jumped off the top of the building in her drug-addled stupor and died. So what the heck was the fellatio scene we just saw? A succubus? A hallucination from Bud's disordered mind?

You know what? Who cares what it was. I just sat through an hour and a half of this pretentious pap (actually, I managed to cut the time down a little bit by watching some of the long scenes in fast motion) to see something that turns out to be an elaborate, hardcore ABC afterschool special.

The Brown Bunny is a self-absorbed piece of shit from Vincent Gallo. In its excesses, it recalls the worst, most indulgent films of the 1960s such as Zabriskie Point. But at least those usually came with a good soundtrack. All this has to recommend is an odd sort of sex scene near the end, and if you want that sort of entertainment, you'd do better to go out and rent some good honest pornography rather than this nonsense.


Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age