Vincent Gallo
The Brown Bunny

The old brown bunny of Daisy is still being fed and kept at home by her elderly mother. She harbors the hope of seeing her daughter, who vanished into thin air, once again.

Bud, with a face as gloomy and melancholic as if on the verge of suicide, begins his journey by car; destination California: it's no longer time for motorcycle races, better to resolve the inner turmoil that's tearing him apart.

The Brown Bunny presents itself as a road movie that has almost nothing to do with road movies. Although the soundtrack (curated by the amazing shaman John Frusciante) is of dazzling and impeccable refinement, what will forcefully enter the viewer's gut are the long and endless silences. It's as if you were sitting in the passenger seat watching the protagonist cry desperately and seek unlikely female company (consistently rejected), you'll notice that urban silence dominates the film, making it less theatrical but rich in indie naturalness.

After the presentation at the 2003 Cannes festival, film aficionado Roger Ebert expressed negative critiques to the press, calling The Brown Bunny the worst film he had ever seen in his life, a crappy movie. The personality of Vincent Gallo (director, lead actor, filming technician), already famous both in independent circuits and in Hollywood, led to a rather heavy exchange of insults between the two (Gallo even wished cancer upon him), which eventually ended with the birth of a friendship after Ebert had a chance to see the cut and final version of the film with a consequent change of opinion.

But then, why so much uproar and why so many critiques? The answer lies in a single scene that has sparked and continues to spark discussion. A scene that I personally find spot-on and aggressively functional to the storyline. It unfolds towards the end and features the two main actors on set, Gallo (Bud) and Chloë Sevigny (Daisy).

I must honestly say that the surface well conceals the turmoil of emotions that the film's ending contains. Perhaps the problem (the only one in my opinion) with The Brown Bunny is precisely that it would have worked much better as a short film. The effectiveness of certain dialogues is only presented after seventy minutes of viewing.

I advise those interested in the film not to read other reviews about it online (to avoid spoilers, of course) because you won't find one that doesn't spoil the suspense, with all due respect to the "predecessors."

Buffalo '66 from 1998 and The Brown Bunny from 2003 are the most famous works of Vincent Gallo, an arrogant and straightforward guy who has also made enemies; he hides no emotion from his interlocutors (just watch the fascinating interview by Howard Stern on YouTube).

In my next review on the aforementioned soundtrack, I will delve more exhaustively into the mood and the relationship between the settings and the old tracks chosen to characterize the film.