The Brown Bunny will always been overshadowed by the notoriety and controversies that surround it. Audiences booed its premiere at Cannes and the film was almost universally trashed by critics. When it received a theatrical release in altered form in the US in 2004, a storm of controversy accrued over the notorious final scene where Chloe Sevigny performs oral sex on Vincent Gallo on camera. The film’s promotional campaign played on the controversy but this had an adverse effect when complaints forced distributors to remove billboards that highlighted this in the promotion. This controversy even had Chloe Sevigny dumped by her agent.

And then there was the rather funny slagging match between Vincent Gallo and Roger Ebert. Ebert went so far as to call The Brown Bunny “the worst film in the history of Cannes,” to which Gallo responded calling Ebert “a fat pig with the physique of a slave trader.” Ebert retorted, “one day I will be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny.” Gallo is reported to have placed a curse on Ebert’s colon, only for Ebert to then be diagnosed with cancer to which Ebert responded by stating that “even my colonoscopy was more entertaining than the film”. The two eventually settled their differences with Ebert even going so far as to write a positive review of the re-edited version of The Brown Bunny. Gallo subsequently claimed that journalists had blown up the entire dispute.

It should be noted the version of The Brown Bunny seen in general release (and reviewed here) is some 26 minutes shorter than the version that was booed at Cannes. This differs in regard to Gallo’s elimination or shortening of a number of scenes. As far as one can ascertain without having the original to compare to these include the removing of some five minutes of the racing track scenes at the start; a long fade to black at the end of the film where Gallo’s character would have killed himself; shortening of the motel sequence; and removing some eight minutes of driving scenes. That said, the cut version seen by the rest of the world still seems to have accrued just as bad reviews as the Cannes version.

Even in its condensed form, The Brown Bunny is an unbelievably indulgent film – and this is the opinion of a reviewer who has sat through most of the works of Andrei Tarkovsky who was notorious for his shots that went on for 10 minutes. It is as though Vincent Gallo has determined to push an audience’s tolerance to an absolute limit. Almost nothing happens throughout the film. The first five minutes consists solely of scenes of motorbikes racing around a track. A good half of the film probably consists of footage of American highways and countryside shot out of the window of Gallo’s van. While initially interesting, these scenes go on and on well beyond the point that Gallo has surely communicated to us that his character leads a tedium-inducing life on the road. Indeed, you almost start to wonder if Gallo is not attempting to conduct a remake of Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971), a film that was shot entirely shot from a truck driving through the Sahara desert.

To Vincent Gallo’s credit, he is attempting to create a level of realism in the film – the interactions with the other characters have the effect of really being there, rather than being shot with standard dramatic Hollywood pacing. But he also includes a level of detail about the mundane and inconsequential to a point of tedium. In the middle of the film, for instance, there is a long scene where none of the detail has been cut as Gallo stops in the middle of the Utah salt flats and we watch as unpacks his motorcycle from his van and then drives off all the way to the horizon. If one took out all the driving scenes, most of the incident that occurs could be compacted down to around 20 minutes of running time. Indeed, one suspects that did The Brown Bunny not come with the controversy of the blowjob scene, it is a film that would never have been granted a release at all.

That is not to say that what Vincent Gallo is trying to do with The Brown Bunny is uninteresting. One of the most strangely intriguing aspects is the encounters his character has with various women – he pleads with and persuades a convenience store girl (Anna Vareschi) to come to California with him, only to drive off on her when she stops by her house to pack her bags; there’s a silent encounter with a woman (Cheryl Tiegs) that he walks up to at a roadside rest stop, empathizes with her suffering and then starts to kiss her before he breaks down and abruptly leaves; or where he picks up a prostitute (Elizabeth Blake), buys her takeaways but then is unable to go through with doing anything and drops her off. These scenes are interesting, especially in that Gallo’s character seems to be able to empathize with and hold some hypnotic power over these women without saying much to them at all. At the same time as this, Bud remains completely murky to us as a character. There are a great many closeups shots of Vincent Gallo’s face as he drives, but what goes on behind those sunglasses is something that we are never granted privy to and the constant opaqueness of the film becomes frustrating.

The most interesting part of the film is the completely left field ending. Almost everybody ended up being either turned on, outraged or left indifferent by the long (and probably wholly gratuitous) scene with Chloe Sevigny giving Vincent Gallo a blowjob. The controversy around the scene tended to eclipse the bizarre twist that comes immediately after. Indeed, I wasn’t even expecting to review The Brown Bunny as a genre film until this popped up. [PLOT SPOILERS]. After having sex, Gallo and Chloe Sevigny sit back and discuss what happened that led to their split up where she suddenly, casually announces “I’m dead, Bud.” It is in this moment that we suddenly realize that the flashbacks to their split up where he believes he walked in on her with other guys was really a scene where she was being gang raped and that after he left she choked to death. Certainly, it is here that The Brown Bunny, after some 80 minutes of driving scenes, does become interesting.

This is also something that puts The Brown Bunny into the same category of deathdream films that have followed the success of The Sixth Sense (1999), all of which arrive at a twist ending that reveals that the protagonist or someone close to them has been dead all along. There has been a reasonable body of these films, including An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962), Carnival of Souls (1962), Seizure/Queen of Evil (1974), The Survivor (1981), Sole Survivor (1983), Siesta (1987), Jacob’s Ladder (1990), Final Approach (1991), A Pure Formality (1994), The Others (2001) and Stay (2005). Indeed, recent films such as I Pass for Human (2004), Hidden (2005) and Someone’s Knocking at the Door (2009) have started to appropriate the deathdream ending for indie/arthouse efforts, usually with pretentious and equally unwatchable results.