The self-congratulating connoisseur, having endured Vincent Gallo's (Buffalo 66) second feature film Brown Bunny, is likely to propose the apt title Vincent Gallo Drives a Van. And it's true-we do spend an ungodly amount of time watching Gallo's windshield, a ghost passenger to Gallo's doppelganger, Bud Clay, as he drives across the barren state. It's an aspect of the film that's likely to drive any unconditioned viewer up the wall. But it's this peculiar distance and idleness of the film, occurring in what most will agree seems like real-time, that makes Gallo's (the director/writer/actor/director of photography/editor/producer /film crew/entire production) self-treatise especially urgent.The film's nasty reputation seems to be gliding since its harried, scattered release in late August. Other than an occasional critical scolding, the film has sunken into obscurity, likely to lay dormant for some time.

Part of this is an expected reaction, a petering out of the grotesque discourse over the film after its controversial reception at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003, where Gallo placed a hex on Roger Ebert. The feedback Gallo received was undoubtedly due to the film's now infamous climactic scene: a ten-minute real time sexual encounter with Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don't Cry) that is in some senses unprecedented in narrative film. Booed off the scene and pigeon-holed as a sadistic egomaniac by the press, Gallo retreated for a year to tinker with his precious diamond-in-the-rough. Hemmed a surly half-hour, the re-release film is undoubtedly clearer than its Cannes counterpart, but there's still the whole, undigested Gallo to deal with.

Brown Bunny follows Bud, a failing motorcycle racer, as he drifts from New Hampshire across America, gravitating toward his lost love, Daisy (Sevigny) in Los Angeles.

After a few desperate encounters with seemingly random women, Gallo eventually arrives in L.A., finds his lost love Daisy, whereupon they engage in awkward rapture, leading to the revelations that end the film.

Gallo's genius is in the self-orbiting attention in which he moderates the difficult audience tension. His film achieves a sterile, standoffish, hapless framing that places one in the most uncomfortable seat in which to judge. Not the least interesting example of this technique is the controversial scene itself. While the situation may be too close for comfort, we're not necessarily in the character's face, but rather just a few inches back, where the action gathers the most subtle sense of desperateness and dignity that seems totally alien to the filthy encounter we're witnessing.

However, even more interesting is the drastic turn Gallo takes immediately after the completion of the scene. Gallo throws himself onto a bed, and shrinks into the fetal position crying for love with the most desperate and high-pitched tears. A severe shift in energy and viewer attention, Gallo's breakdown is one of the most vulnerable moments in all of film. It's completely unexpected and the gravity of his character's neuroses and true mental instability reaches its fullest, most realistic expression. Although the concluding flashback of the film spirals out of control and to some extent dilutes the reality we've been trapped in for so long, the preceding moments with Daisy are nonetheless endlessly fascinating.

Gallo's attention to issues of helplessness, vulnerability and transience are thoughtful, sincere and poignant. And while we may be spending the duration of the film glaring at Gallo's self-possession and staring out of his windshield, ultimately it's the sparse social interaction that reveals the true disparity and punctures our reality of Bud. Of course the world here does revolve around Vincent Gallo, but it's a much different world than in Buffalo 66.

If Buffalo 66 was a swirling redirection of attention at Gallo's unsavory character, Brown Bunny is a more deliberate and unique brand of self-deprecation. Less playful and deliberately funny, this film delivers a certain danger and inconsistency in Gallo's character. His interactions with the women of the film relate the subtle complexities of this sad fragility. One of the most hilarious of these is his encounter with Violet, a gas station attendant. As he attempts to coax her to join him, he whines childishly: "Please...," and then "Please...," and then, "Pleeeeeease!"

The reason Gallo can get away with these abuses is because of a general sense of self-perspective. What Gallo as director/actor exhibits is ironic self-consciousness, as opposed to unconscious narcissism and arrogance. Gallo has a genuine sense of perspective and interest in listening to his actors that is as bizarre as it is endearing.

This does not however, get Gallo (both the artist and his character) completely off the hook. The aggression with which he acts is tempered and grounded by the female voice of the film. Oh knee-jerk feminists! Beware: little did you expect that the women of Gallo's film would have the last say. Quite difference from Gallo's manipulation of Christina Ricci in Buffalo 66 is Sevigny's conception of Daisy. Appearing to us initially as a cracked-out whore, Daisy has a sense of empowerment and resolution that follows with her fragile phrases. While definitely beaten down by the world, it's obvious to see Daisy is one who rolls with the punches and hasn't internalized the world so much as has Bud. It's revealing that as Daisy pleasures Bud she's indulging his fantasy and providing relief from his internalized world of pain. We see a subtle firmness and dignity in Daisy that, while faded and pained, surfaces in a far more congenial form of humanity than Bud's delusions and collapse.

Gallo, the artist and the character, is a man just as engaged with society and life as he is spiteful. More than anything Brown Bunny is an exercise in distance and proximity, one which reveals the complex, perverse, empathetic workings of this strange and frightening character.