While most films are labelled as “controversial,” this one stands out above the rest.
Forget people being annoyed at the new Lion King being called live-action; this movie led to a film critic being called a ‘fat pig’ and the director being booed at his premiere.
All of this comes from a range of reasons, most prominently that the director had his co-star perform unstimulated oral sex on him in the film’s most controversial scene.
The film in question is The Brown Bunny, produced in 2003. They were directed by Vincent Gallo, a polarising filmmaker.
It focuses on the director, who starred as a motorcycle racer who travels across the country, hoping to meet women to distract him from his one true love, Daisy, played by Chloë Sevigny.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with as close to a mixed reaction’ as can possibly be.
While members of Gallo’s camp claim that the film received 10 minutes of standing ovations, other sources claim the director’s name was jeered whenever it appeared on screen.
Legendary film critic Roger Ebert famously hated the film, calling it the ‘worst’ to ever be screened at Cannes.
This started a high profile spat between Gallo and Ebert, with Gallo calling Ebert a ‘fat pig with the physique of a slave trader’.
Ebert hilariously stated that a colonoscopy would be more entertaining than The Brown Bunny and said that while he was indeed fat, ‘one day [he] will be thin, and [Gallo] will still be the director of The Brown Bunny
The pair eventually squashed their beef, in part due to Roger Ebert giving a re-cut version of the film a more favorable rating of three out of four.
The film’s most controversial scene involved Sevigny giving Gallo an unstimulated blowjob.
While this may be spoilers, a wild detail is that the scene ended up being a vision—and didn’t actually happen—as Daisy had overdosed years earlier.
So, it didn’t happen in the film, but it did happen in real life.
Reports state that Sevigny was not the original star of the film, as the role was offered to Jennifer Jason Leigh, who claims she turned it down as she was in a relationship at the time.
