Bright Lights, Funny Bunnies
YES, IT'S REAL. I'm not just talking about the unfaked sex scene that ends actor-writer-director Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny. I'm talking about cinema's potential for intimacy and personal expression-potentials fulfilled by Gallo's movie, which opens Friday at Landmark's Sunshine Cinema, and Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves, which opens Wednesday at Film Forum.
On first glance, the two films seem to have little in common. The Brown Bunny is a glum, trippy road picture about a nomadic motorcycle racer (Gallo) shattered by a lost love (Chloë Sevigny). It arrives in New York a year and a half after its debut at Cannes, where it earned widespread derision and a thimbleful of contrarian praise and sparked a feud between Roger Ebert, who declared Bunny the worst film in the festival's history, and Gallo, who called Ebert a "fat pig" and put a curse on his colon. This feud, coupled with the media's predictable "Is it porn?" discussion and Gallo's hypocritical approach toward selling The Brown Bunny-he insists he's just a soulful artiste and that there's more to the film than its climactic oral sex act, yet spent his own money to decorate Sunset Boulevard with a 60-foot poster of Sevigny going down on him-have ensured a level of public notice that eludes most semi-experimental features.
But while Gallo's film is fiction and McElwee's is based on fact, they're technical, esthetic and spiritual kin. Both were shot on Super 16mm by one-man-band filmmakers. Both wander off commercial cinema's beaten path early and rarely return, and both spring an 11th-hour revelation that forces one to reevaluate what came before. Where most narrative features aspire to be like novels, The Brown Bunny and Bright Leaves feel more like journals. They're stream-of-consciousness, episodic, at times inscrutable. They record quixotic journeys, reflect on natural beauty, embrace ambiguity and contradiction and focus on a central character's tangled emotions.
McElwee's latest feature takes its title from Michael Curtiz's Bright Leaf" a 1950s melodrama starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. McElwee's family lore says Bright Leaf, was based on McElwee's great grandad, whose innovative tobacco mix was allegedly stolen and exploited by their rivals, the Dukes. McElwee says he made this new documentary to sift fact from fiction and to ponder tobacco's effect on the South, America and the world. But as in other McElwee films, the director's stated agenda seems mere pretext for another chapter in one of American cinema's most distinctive and influential diaries.
McElwee has done this kind of thing just often enough that it has become kind of a ritual. The pattern was established in McElwee's breakthrough Sherman's March (1986), which started out as a film about General William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea, but got derailed by McElwee's breakup with his girlfriend and became a meandering consideration of the director's love life. 1996's Six O'Clock News ostensibly looked at real Americans who'd been treated as props in fear-mongering local newssts, but ended up being about an artist's feelings of helplessness in the face of violence, destruction and simple mortality.
Similarly, Bright Leaves starts out concerned with a Hollywood film and an addictive crop, then expands its scope, musing on the allure of drugs and art, the fragility of existence and the meaning of words like "inheritance" and "birthright." (McElwee's son Adrian, referenced repeatedly in home-movie footage, is pictured helping his dad record sound in a hospital scene.) McElwee hangs with Patricia Neal, novelist Allan Gurganus, his cousin John and his former high school teacher Charleen, a fixture in several McElwee films. He periodically visits with a couple of smokers who keep insisting they're about to quit but never do. Visiting Russian film theorist Vladimir Petric agrees to McElwee's request to critique Curtiz's film, but only if McElwee agrees to sit in a wheelchair and film the interview from a low angle while Petric pushes him around to make the experience more "kinesthetic."
McElwee ties these elements together (loosely) by musing on the addictiveness of photography and nicotine, both of which foster the impression that time has been suspended or frozen. The director can't decide if this impression is true and seems unwilling to push the matter. He counters the early statement, "Filming doesn't slow anything down" with the touching confession, "When I look through a viewfinder, time just seems to stop."
McElwee's ambivalence is self-serving and quite understandable. Artists must believe that art fixes and preserves life, if only for a moment-otherwise they're helpless dreamers engaged in a process that's as futile as it is enticing. He realizes that certain snippets of celluloid-a shot of his son tying his shoes, an image of his late surgeon father, a Presbyterian, mysteriously clad in a yarmulke-have embedded themselves so deeply in his memory that they have displaced real memories and rendered others irrelevant. By obsessively documenting one's life, does one blot out a real sense of helplessness with a false sense of control?
For another definition of helpless, see Bud Clay, Gallo's character in The Brown Bunny-a man who still seems to be in shock over a disastrous affair with his first love, Daisy (Sevigny). The film's first major sequence finds Clay racing his motorbike around and around and around a track, literally going in circles; the remainder of his cross-country odyssey, which brings him inexorably closer to memories of Daisy, is also a kind of retreat. Bud spends the whole movie thinking he's running toward something, but he's really running away.
Bud's glowering passivity-he seems to know he's emotionally paralyzed and hates himself for it-may prove as off-putting to mainstream moviegoers as the movie's much discussed sex scene. (Male viewers-especially high school and college kids-especially like having their macho fantasies vindicated, and therefore hate movies about indecisive men.) Alternately sweet, grim and puzzling, The Brown Bunny plays like a cultural autopsy-an accounting of the false sexual expectations raised in men's minds by a lifetime of church, sports, movies, pop music and hanging out with other guys. The film's ending might be real, or it could be a male fantasy that turns on itself, shattering the sensual reverie it created.
Equally challenging is Gallo's directorial style, which mixes fetishized road film imagery-including driving montages taken through windshields smeared with dead bugs and bird shit, one of which is counter-intuitively and perfectly paired with a Gordon Lightfoot tune-and close-ups of the hero thinking without revealing what he's thinking about. Gallo and 70s supermodel Cheryl Tiegs have a wordless scene at a highway rest stop that's as inexplicable-and as moving-as any scene in an American film this year.
It all sounds precious. But if you're in the right frame of mind, it's beautiful. Avoiding conventional satisfactions-and flirting with pretentious amateurishness throughout, just like in Buffalo '66-Gallo makes an ego-free work of egotism, a film that has no other ambition but to be true to the intentions of its creator. In the process, it captures minor, outwardly banal sensations-the desolate beauty of middle-American interstates, the low-level adrenaline rush that comes from being perpetually depressed and angry-with a singer-songwriter's sureness.
Like Gallo's alternately mesmerizing and infuriating debut Buffalo '66, The Brown Bunny reminds one of works by many American arthouse darlings (especially David Lynch, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch and Monte Hellman of Two-Lane Blacktop) without copying any of them. It's as original as McElwee's work, but far less lovable.
Both McElwee and Gallo avoid the usual hand-holding-the three-act structure, the wrap-it-all-up postscript, the monologue that precisely explains the title's significance for the benefit of children and mouth-breathers. Both directors embrace an esthetic that brushes against home-movie amateurism, then pushes past it, entering the realm of poetry and dreams. (At one point in Bright Leaves McElwee even offers a voice-over description of the Cooper film that could double as a description of The Brown Bunny: "A kind of surreal home movie, re-enacted by Hollywood stars.") Is there a place in America's imagination for artistry this independent, delicate and strange? o