There are many kinds of blowjobs--masterful, merciful, hostile, desperate, obsequious, loving, et al. --and even the worst of them is pretty good. The one featured in Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny is the most troubling kind, especially when you consider that the film doesn't truly begin until the already notorious onscreen fellatio occurs, only to end about five minutes after it has finished. After all the weird controversy and anticipation that has surrounded this film, in which the famous Chloë Sevigny really performs the real act on her semi-famous former real-life boyfriend, how could the act itself be anything other than anticlimactic?

As a scene, the blowjob isn't shocking, but it is difficult to watch--and not simply because of the intimacy on display, or the weirdly disjunctive familiarity of the actors. The film's color palette is already so dull and subdued, so porn-textured, that a motel-room suck hardly feels unlikely. And when you factor in the film's willfully European aesthetic--in which America is viewed, at length, as a wide-open vista of corporate corpulence, populated by damaged freaks, and in which the action (or lacktion, you might say) is held in endless, unending takes--a bit of unsimulated copulation, in the frank style now favored by the French, might just be de rigeur.

No, the scene is troubling for all the right reasons; the sex is, as they say in interviews, integral to the plot. Its tone is heavy, mournful, and revealing. And when it really gets going, the emotions it brings out in Gallo's character, an otherwise inert motorcycle racer named Bud Clay, are apocalyptically male and terrifyingly specific, leading to a post-coital relationship examination that instantly reconfigures--and almost transfigures--the entire film that precedes it. Unfortunately, it comes (so to speak) after far too many scenes in which absolutely nothing happens.

(As a blowjob, the blowjob is shocking, thanks to the frankly mammoth size of Gallo's member. Some have speculated that it's a prosthesis. If that's true, it's a gross miscalculation on the part of the design team, on the order of Boogie Nights, or maybe Alien. If it's not, Gallo may have missed his real calling, and not as a porn star, either--as a Gulfstream jet.)

To be fair, advance press has made it almost impossible to watch The Brown Bunny without anticipating the oral sex: When will it happen? What will motivate it? Will it really be pornographic? It's a poisonous spoiler, too, because it forces you to pre-translate everything you see into a single context. Bud Clay has several bizarre encounters with messed-up women on the road trip that leads him across America, beginning with a young girl he picks up in a gas station. He begs her to come along on his journey, she agrees, and moments later he ditches her without a word of explanation. In another film--Five Easy Pieces, say--this action would read as proto-existential male commitment fear. In The Brown Bunny, it just makes you wonder how the blowjob is going to explain his reticence. The thing is: The blowjob does explain his reticence; it does contextualize his actions; it does redeem the movie. It simply waits too long to do it.

Clearly, Bud Clay is haunted by memory, and clearly, Gallo is committed to demonstrating that condition with empathy. But where his previous film, Buffalo 66, practically melted with its lead character's bitter tenderness, drawing you ever closer with his outré behavior, Bunny's emotional landscape is almost entirely internal. Sharing a cross-country ride with Bud is like a protracted visit with a stranger so engulfed by pain that he has forgotten how to speak. It's not that you don't feel for the guy, but his silence is so engulfing that you just want to leave him alone. And you certainly don't want to spend 90 minutes watching him drive, shower, brood, and weep, which is almost all this movie is. By the time Sevigny shows up, smoking drugs and begging forgiveness, all you can wonder is why the hell we had to wait so long for the drama to arrive.