| | |
Features: DVD, Widescreen, Dolby Digital Stereo, English, French, Subtitled
The Brown Bunny is both a love story and a haunting portrait of a lost soul unable to forget his past. After finishing a motorcycle race in New Hampshire, Bud Clay (Vincent Gallo) loads his racing bike into the back of his van and begins a cross-country odyssey to Los Angeles, where he is to compete in another race. During his trip, he meets three very different women: Violet, a wholesome all-American gas station attendant; Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs), a fellow lost soul he connects with at a highway rest stop; and Rose, a Las Vegas prostitute. Throughout his journey, Bud can never escape his intense feelings for the love of his life, Daisy (Chloe Sevigny), so he plans to reconcile with her when he reaches Los Angeles. Arriving in Los Angeles, Bud checks into a motel before visiting the abandoned home he once shared with Daisy. He leaves a note, hoping she will turn up at his motel room... Building to a notorious climax, the film presents one of the frankest portrayals of male sexuality ever seen in American cinema.
"An idiosyncratic document of sexual obsession and guilt, it alienates as easily as it mesmerizes." Neva Chonin, San Francisco Chronicle
"Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip..." Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
"...rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema." Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
Editor's Note
Vincent Gallo shocked the 2003 Cannes Film Festival with this highly personal film that he wrote, directed, produced, edited, photographed, and stars in. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer on his way from New Hampshire to California in a van. The cross-country trip includes stops at a gas station, where Clay meets and falls for a gas station attendant named Violet (Anna Vareschi); a roadside food stand, where he meets the sadly beautiful Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs, making her feature-film debut); and the Las Vegas strip, where he picks up local prostitute Rose (Elizabeth Blake). As he comes into contact with these women, he can't let go of his past, which centers around Daisy (Chloe Sevigny), whom he hopes to find when he returns home to Los Angeles.Nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, THE BROWN BUNNY is a poignant, emotional drama that features long scenes with little or no dialogue, as Gallo uses natural sound and lighting, jazz and folk music, and long, lingering shots of the open road, raindrops on a windshield, and the scraggly-haired protagonist to create a nearly suffocating atmosphere of loss and loneliness. Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2003 Viennale "for its bold exploration of yearning and grief and for its radical departure from dominant tendencies in current American filmmaking," THE BROWN BUNNY is sure to cause a stir because of its infamous and shocking X-rated sex scene near the end of the picture, although it is a tender, soft, and powerfully subtle film.
| Features | Audio: English Dolby Digital Stereo | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, French |
| Technical Info
|
Release Information
| | Studio: Sony Pictures |
| Release Date: 8/28/2007 |
| Running Time: 92 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 2004 | | Catalog ID: 11065 | | UPC: 00043396110656 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English [CC], English | | Available Subtitles: English, French | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 1.66:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Cannes Film Festival (2003) | | | Vincent Gallo, Nominee, Golden Palm |
|
| | Professional Reviews | Entertainment Weekly
"Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker has." 09/03/2004 p.56New York Times
"[V]ery watchable, often beautiful-looking..." 08/27/2004 p.E1 Movieline's Hollywood Life
"[I]t has the gritty visual syntax and off-road sensibility of a lost movie from the '70s." 09/01/2005 p.101 Village Voice 7 of 10
It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject. - J. Hoberman
James Berardinelli's ReelViews 6 of 10
It is worth noting that the film's closing moments offer something vaguely resembling a surprise twist, and that the revelation of what's really going on provides a sense of previously unrecognized psychological depth to The Brown Bunny. So there is value here - the problem is that it's unbearably painful to get to the point where it's realized. As for the blow job - it's real and explicit. Sevigny is Gallo's ex-girlfriend, so she has dismissed the act as doing something in front of the camera that she used to do in private (although one wonders how Gallo would have handled this with either Winona Ryder or Kirsten Dunst, who were other choices for the lead female role). But is it really necessary to the movie? Could the same emotional impact have been achieved without the inclusion of a hard-core scene? Regardless, this has become the only thing people talk about when they mention The Brown Bunny. It overshadows everything else. - James Berardinelli
Chicago Sun-Times 7 of 10
When movies were cut on Movieolas, there was a saying that they could be "saved on the green machine." Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. "The Brown Bunny" is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness. I will always be grateful I saw the movie at Cannes; you can't understand where Gallo has arrived unless you know where he started. - Roger Ebert
|
| |
|
|
|
