Review: Bunny and the Bull
From the director of the surreal, romping TV comedy series The Mighty Boosh comes Bunny and the Bull, Paul King’s first feature. It is the story of Stephen, a pale, sensitive, pathetic man, who, enshrined in pyjamas and red plaid dressing gown, hasn’t left his house in a year. One day, mice get into his backlog of packet vegetarian lasagne and he is forced to consider leaving the house. In doing so, he relives the sequence of events that brought him to this abysmal state from the safely of his flat. And so we travel with Stephen down memory lane towards the conclusion, following him on a road trip around Europe with his best friend and polar opposite, Bunny, a crass, adventurous eccentric with a virile halo of wild ginger hair.
The art direction is a joy to behold. It is like watching a series of mismatched video art installations strung together. Stephen’s European itinerary of bizarre museums is presented in a series of old-school catalogue slides, replete with a monotonic British tour guide. When Stephen and Bunny win on a horse, the odd, painterly backdrop of the bookie’s joint creates the spacious, empty echo of an open studio. Cut-out cars roll by outside, accompanied by the exaggerated sound of a distant car rolling by. In this original simulation of reality, a cinematic juxtaposition occurs when we suddenly notice the actors are performing in open space. Thankfully, the characters were appealing enough to hold my attention (especially the superstitious Eloise, Stephen’s Spanish hitch-hiking love interest, who was aptly described to me as a ‘poor man’s Penelope Cruz’).
But when I stopped gawking at the minutiae and stood back, it is with great disappointment that I observed the story really doesn’t work on a macro level. Brad Nguyen has written previously about the creative potential of 3D, and how the form can be crafted symbolically into the narrative, as it was in Avatar. I think the same principles apply for this new visualisation of reality (somewhere between animation and contemporary art) that is now starting to find an audience in mainstream Indie cinema.
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – a film that wove reality and artistic vision in a similarly illustrative fashion – Kaufman’s story gave Gondry a good narrative reason for his stylistic approach. The premise of a memory-wiping clinic is a conceit which stretches out as a compelling story and also works as a veneer for the metaphor of a desire to forget when life fails us. This meaning enables the startling visions of snow at the beach, or a child-sized Jim Carey hovering under a looming kitchen table.
Bunny and the Bull is about friendship between two very different men, but the visual style serves no purpose other than to make the film quirky and beautiful looking. The ending was so disappointing to me because I was convinced that Stephen’s simulated world was envisioned this way because he is an obsessive compulsive, seriously mentally ill recluse. He even takes tablets to make his hallucinations go away. The editing and art direction make the segues between his (too squeaky clean) neurotic, solitary life and the disastrous road trip in his mind look gorgeous and eccentric. But they are really nothing more than a conventional, chronological lead up to a saccharine and neatly stitched up finale in which Stephen’s mental illness is kissed goodbye with a coy backward glance. Such is the flippant nature of the hilarious but essentially very silly creators of The Mighty Boosh who King seems to emulate.
