The Brown Bunny is a 2003 independent, erotic, romance, and 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.
After it premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, the film garnered a great deal of media attention because of an explicit scene where Sevigny performs unsimulated fellatio on Gallo, as well as a feud between Gallo and the film critic Roger Ebert. Ebert called The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of Cannes, although he later gave a re-edited version his signature "thumbs up", awarding the film three out of four stars.
The film received mixed and heavily polarized reviews from critics, and was nominated for several accolades, including the Palme d'Or. It won the FIPRESCI Prize from the Viennale. The film has since gained a small cult following.
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 persuades 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 (he is told it is about five or six years). 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 about 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, alone again and still not with what he needs.
Cast Vincent Gallo as Bud Clay Chloë Sevigny as Daisy Lemon Cheryl Tiegs as Lilly Elizabeth Blake as Rose Anna Vareschi as Violet Mary Morasky as Mrs. Lemon
Production and release Gallo conceived the film's title before writing its story. He is fond of the color brown, and rabbits are his favorite animal.
The film was shot in 16 mm and then blown up in 35 mm, which gives the photography a typical "old-school grain". Gallo reportedly shot the film using two Aaton 16mm cameras, Super Baltar lenses, a Nagra IV-STC recorder, and an Angénieux zoom lens purchased from The Stanley Kubrick Estate. Vincent Gallo credited himself as director of the photography as well as one of the three camera operators along with Toshiaki Ozawa and John Clemens.
During the film's production, Gallo stated that he became "almost maniacal" in trying to create the film. He personally painted Bud's motorcycle, which appears in the film's opening race sequence, "dozens of times to get just the right shade of gold." Gallo stated that he fainted twice during the film's production, due to exhaustion from working.
The film's opening race scene was shot at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. The U.S. theatrical version of the film 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 four minutes shorter), 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." Actress Jennifer Jason Leigh was initially set to play the role that Sevigny played, including the unsimulated oral sex scene, but ultimately turned the role down due to being in a relationship at the time.Jennifer Jason Leigh – Leigh Would Not Have Shied Away From Brown Bunny Controversy
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. Neither side of the screen had any audio tracks attached, although the song "Milk and Honey" by folk singer Jackson C. Frank played over the trailer's duration.
Themes and analysis Gallo, a conservative and teetotaler, has stated that he views The Brown Bunny as "a celebration of America that is virulently anti-drug and anti-pornography." The film explores themes of masculinity, depression, loneliness, social alienation, romantic love, and self-esteem.
The film also uses flower motifs, with Bud Clay's four female romantic interests each being named after flowers: Daisy, Lily, Rose, and Violet.
The film's title is evoked three times within the film, referencing Daisy's pet bunny, a bunny seen in a pet store by Clay, and to a chocolate bunny that Bud once gave to Daisy. Film critic Richard von Busack of Metroactive interpreted that when Clay asks How long do these bunnies live?'...he's really asking, 'How long does love last?' and he's chilled by the pet-store owner's answer: 'Five or six years at the most.
On the film's sex scene, Randy Kennedy of The New York Times wrote that the film's "sex scene does seem like the antithesis of pornography. The camera and microphones are so close to the characters that the familiar sense of voyeuristic distance is impossible to maintain." Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the film's controversial sex scene "and its dialogue, and a flashback to the Daisy character at a party, work together to illuminate complex things about Bud's sexuality, his guilt, and his feelings about women...Gallo takes the materials of pornography and repurposes them into a scene about control and need, fantasy and perhaps even madness. That scene is many things, but erotic is not one of them."
The Georgetown Voice also called the sex scene "Raw, gripping and slightly repulsive", comparing it to a similar scene in Requiem for a Dream, while emphasizing the un-erotic nature of both. The Chicago Tribune reached a similar conclusion, describing the sex scene as "almost nothing really sexy or pleasurable. It's desperate, hollow: a lover reaching for emotions that have shriveled up."
In 2018, Gallo further explained the film's anti-pornographic themes, writing in an open letter:
The Brown Bunny was an attempt at maintaining illusions and simultaneously presenting a heightened and enhanced version of reality, while hoping to result in new forms of insight into pathological behavior.
I was also interested in a character that even during sex could not let his mind go blank and fill up with the sex. Instead, while having sex he is rapidly thinking and his thoughts have a range of emotions far away from pleasure. This strange behavior juxtaposed against graphic real sex is disturbing.
The common purpose of pornography is to enhance sexual pleasure or sexual fantasy...I chose to use imagery common in pornography but placed these images in the emotional context which included intense guilt, anger, regret, anguish, and confusion. In this context, it is difficult for the images to enhance sexual pleasure or sexual fantasy. Instead, the graphic images work better to enhance the discomfort of intimacy.
The Georgetown Voice concluded that "Whether Bud Clay represents the modern individual condemned to mechanical sex, like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, or serves as a reflection of the male condition at the intersection of love, sex and possession, The Brown Bunny is Gallo's brutal depiction of one man's tragic reality."
Steven Hyden of Grantland similarly opined that "The Brown Bunny can be viewed as a depiction of the neediness and alienation at the core of traditional masculinity. Its final scene is perhaps best read as a critique of pornographic imagery, and a demonstration of how disturbing real live sex onscreen can be when human feeling isn't forcibly removed."
Filmmaker Josh Safdie also wrote that "No matter how many times you run it over in your head, no matter how many times you act it out, ride a motorcycle, hit the road, you're alone with yourself and you always come back to the same thoughts and that is loneliness...That is why The Brown Bunny is Gallo's best work. Self expression at its dire straights [sic] and most important." Filmmaker David Lowery described the film as a self-flagellation of "male ego".
Film critic Tony McKibbin also observed the film's focus on American culture, writing: "As [Clay] travels from St Louis to Salt Lake City, Gallo shows us the 'Other America', the offscreen space of a Hollywood cinema that usually suggests all the fret and anxiety lies at the end of a gun rather than in bills to pay, poor diets, low salaries and illness. This the reality Gallo is attuned to as he conveys the pockets of a life."