The Brown
Bunny (***)
review by Joe
Swanberg
I
really love driving. I’ve spent a lot of time in a car,
and I’ve driven from one side of this country to another,
and no film has captured what that’s like as well as
Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny.” In fact,
I don’t suspect anyone will ever try to top it. In the
sense of capturing what it’s really like to be on the
road, this film is the ultimate road movie.
The film allows the audience to take a trip from the East Coast
to the West Coast with Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer. He stops
a few times to get gas, and tries to share intimate moments
with three women. Each of these intimate encounters ends with
Bud unable to continue, because he cannot stop thinking about
his former love, Daisy.
At the end of the road trip, we get to meet Daisy, when
she visits Bud in his hotel room in Los Angeles. She does
drugs
in the bathroom and performs oral sex on Bud before the scene
reveals to the audience that Daisy died due to a drug overdose,
after being raped by two men at a party. Bud was a witness
to the rape and walked away, without helping Daisy. He is unable
to deal with Daisy’s death, but this allows him to
express his grief and clear up the details of that night,
because he has attempted to block it from his mind.
The film opens with a 4 minute shot of a motorcycle race taken
from one camera angle, following Bud around the track. After
the race, Bud loads up his bike and heads toward California
in his black van. He stops to get gas, and meets the first
of his three flower women, Violet, who he convinces to come
to California with him, but quickly abandons at her house after
she goes inside to collect her belongings. This sequence is
probably my least favorite in the film, because it feels very
different in tone from the rest of the film. I feel like it
sets Bud up to the be the likable loser, and the scene plays
out almost as a joke, with the van pulling away after Violet
disappears into her house. She leaves a note for her aunt and
uncle who run the gas station, which is also a little too jokey
to feel really comfortable with the rest of the film.
Then Bud drives.
Later, we meet Lilly, the second flower woman, at a rest stop
in the Midwest. She is obviously a wounded soul, and Bud sits
down next to her with his Coca-Cola and they make out for a
little while, until Bud can’t stand it anymore, and he
leaves. This scene fits much better with the tone of the film,
and you learn much more about Bud than you did from his interaction
with Violet.
The third flower woman is Rose, a prostitute in Las Vegas,
who Bud picks up and gets some McDonalds with, before kicking
her out of the car and driving off.
When we finally meet Daisy, we get the best sequence in the
film. Bud can’t understand why she smoked pot with the
guys at the party, and why she was kissing them. She explains
that she just wanted to get high, and when she passed out,
they raped her. Of course this scene is all happening in Bud’s
head, as he finally deals with the experience that took his
girlfriend’s life.
You get the sense that Gallo is not interested in keeping the
audience interested. You are free to drift in and out, back
and forth between the daze you get from driving too long, and
the thrill of watching something beautiful on a big screen.
The photography is grainy and intimate, and mostly very beautiful.
The film plays by no rules, and should leave you excited about
the possibilities of cinema.
respond to joe@filmbrats.com
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