The first time I watched Buffalo ’66 – Matteo Gagliardi
https://www.vice.com/it/article/znj883/buffalo-66-vincent-gallo[🡕]
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Vincent Gallo is everything. Actor, director, painter, model, musician, producer, screenwriter, and hustler. He recorded five albums at home, playing almost all the instruments himself and designing the CD packaging; from 1985 to last year’s Japanese thriller Jinrui Shikin, he’s been credited in forty-two films; on vincentgallo.com you can purchase his sperm for a million dollars (with a fifty-thousand discount if you attach a photo proving your Aryan features, blond hair and blue eyes, or if you can demonstrate direct descent from a mid-20th-century German soldier).
Gallo has made three feature films. In chronological order: a beautiful film, “the worst film ever seen at the Cannes festival,” and a third screened only at the Venice Film Festival, the sole copy of which is locked in a drawer in his studio in Hollywood Hills. Also on his website, in the “Acting” section, a few months ago it read: ”April (2013) feature 88 minutes, written, produced and directed by Vincent Gallo.” When newspapers asked for more information, Vinnie replied: “The film rests in peace, preserved without exposing it to the dark energies of the public.”
In addition to being all that, Vincent Gallo is also “one of the most misunderstood talents of the past 25 years,” as he wrote himself in the section: “Vincent Gallo Biography.”
What keeps Vincent Gallo from being just a useless asshole is his acting skill and his confidence behind the camera. Leaving aside his performances as an actor, to which Vincent has always dedicated himself with unassailable professionalism, his work as a director reveals his brutal originality.
Roger Ebert, one of his most famous enemies, the one who trashed his second directorial effort, The Brown Bunny (remembered mostly for an uncensored blowjob scene), called it “the worst thing ever seen at a festival” (to which Gallo responded by calling him a “fat pig with the body of a slave trader,” and Ebert replied: “I may be fat, but one day I can be thin, while he will always be the director of The Brown Bunny”). Ebert later changed his mind when Gallo re-released the film trimmed by almost half an hour (the blowjob was still there). Vincent didn’t take the Cannes incident well at all, though, and decided to screen his third film, Promises Written in Water, only at the Venice Film Festival, and to make his latest, April, without showing it to anyone. In a stunted filmography, we’re left with the peaceful viewing of just one of his films. The first of his career, Buffalo ’66 from 1998.
By peaceful viewing, I mean free from the fear that Gallo might whip his dick out again.
The first time I watched Buffalo ’66, I was mesmerized by the first twenty minutes of the film. What struck me right away wasn’t the plot or the main character, but the iatrogenic way Gallo tells stories with. I understood what avant-garde cinema really meant. In those first twenty minutes, there’s all the best of Vincent Gallo, and everything I would never see again in any of his other films.
Buffalo ’66 tells the story of Billy Brown’s first day of freedom. It begins in the morning when he’s released from prison and ends at night when all hell breaks loose. Between those two moments, we get to know Billy more intimately – who his parents are, who his friends are, and most importantly, why he went to jail. Before doing-the-things-you-normally-see-in-movies, Billy has to pee. He’s been holding it in since he got on the bus to Buffalo. When he arrives at the bus terminal, he asks where the bathroom is. Out of order. His need to pee leads him by chance into a dance studio, where he meets Layla (Christina Ricci). And from that moment on, the movie truly begins.
As soon as he sees Layla walking down the hallway of the gym, he jumps on her, covers her mouth, and drags her into a car. He wants to introduce her to his parents, who don’t know he’s been in prison and think he came to town with his wife. (From prison, Billy had been sending fake letters telling his parents he’d gotten married and no longer lived in Buffalo. He had them mailed by his only friend, a dimwitted guy named Goon, who lives among reptiles in his bedroom and can’t stay on the phone too long or his mom gets mad.)
In the car, on the way to lunch at his parents’ house, Billy explains the plan to Layla – the story she’ll need to stick to – and then tells her to pull over and keep her hands on the wheel, clearly visible. He has to get out for a second, to take a piss.
Gallo doesn’t care about logic or consistency – what matters to him is emotion. The depth of the characters, their backstories, don’t matter; what matters is the intensity of the scene in the moment, like during the lunch.
Billy’s parents are perfect. We know very little about them, but it’s enough to make us feel depressed and ashamed. All while they sit at the table. His mentally ill mother spends her days watching the 1966 Buffalo Bills NFL game – every day for over thirty years, getting angry every time at the final missed point by her team. She wears the team cap and sweater like a true fan. She even has Buffalo-logo glasses. At lunch, while Billy’s mother (Angelica Huston) watches the game and frequently loses the thread of conversation, the others eat tripe [sic] and talk. His father, Ben Gazzara, speaks very little; he used to sing. He wants to sleep with Layla – he keeps asking her to hug him and hold him tight. Billy stays silent the entire time. Layla plays the part of the wife and tells the “in-laws” how much she loves her husband, but then goes overboard with the lies and makes up a story that Billy works for the CIA.
From a technical and directorial standpoint, Gallo is formidable. By now we’re used to Wes Anderson’s polished, charming slow-motion shots with ethereal women stepping off buses to the sound of Nico, where everything is choreography – Gallo’s, by contrast, are simply grotesque. After lunch at his parents’ house, Billy and Layla go bowling. Only he plays – he’s a master, she has to watch. In slow motion, the camera follows the entire process: the preparation, putting on the glove, unzipping the boots, the focus before the throw, and Layla taking off her sweater. No Nico, no Sigur Rós. In Buffalo ’66 it’s only prog rock and original music by Vincent Gallo. While Billy delivers an endless string of strikes, the lights dim and Layla dances, tapping lightly to a slow, undanceable King Crimson song.
Then, finally, we find out why he was arrested – an hour into the film. Billy pulls a gun out of a locker at the bowling alley and hides it in his pocket.
Buffalo ’66 is pure sprezzatura. A quality that “the most misunderstood artist of the past 25 years” seems to possess with incredible ease. Gallo is able to hide the art and present what he does effortlessly, without seeming to think about it. Right up to the ending – a triumph of tackiness and tenderness, where, with grace, Vincent not only teases Layla, Goon, and the audience, but also time and death. Vincent Gallo can do everything.