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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Vincent Gallo, a downtown New York artist active since the early eighties as a musician, photographer, painter, model, actor, and filmmaker, has a face like a rusty hatchet (needle nose, scraggly beard), damp inky hair, and an unnerving stare. In "Buffalo '66" (1998), the first feature-length movie Gallo directed, he plays a recently released con looking for a place to pee. After finding it, he picks up a willing teen-ager (Christina Ricci), but, instead of having sex with her, takes her to visit his nasty parents--a new low in the history of perversity. The movie's prickly, vagrant humor was odd and unsatisfying. "Buffalo '66" withheld much more than it communicated, and, fairly or not, I came out of it believing that Gallo, who also co-wrote the movie, was very similar in temperament to the scary, enraged character onscreen, who radiated sexual energy but couldn't bear to be touched. Bud Clay, the character Gallo plays in his new movie, "The Brown Bunny," can't stand being touched, either. After losing a motorcycle race in New Hampshire, Bud wheels his Honda RS 250 into a black van and begins a cross-country trek home to Los Angeles, where he plans to hook up with an old girlfriend, Daisy (Chloe Sevigny). He journeys through plains, mountains, and red skies--a romantic loner unconsciously passing across heroic American landscapes--mostly in silence. Now and then, Bud...
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