BUFFALO '66

Few movies look or feel quite like Vincent Gallo's BUFFALO ’66, a beautifully deranged romantic fantasy in which the dreary landscape of upstate New York becomes the setting for one man's elaborate exercise in self-pity. Shot on gorgeously faded 35mm, the film is full of extraordinary visual inventions: flashbacks that invade the present, musical numbers that materialize out of nowhere, and Christina Ricci performing an exquisite tap dance to King Crimson in a deserted bowling alley. It's a movie of almost embarrassing personal obsession, with a visual imagination capable of making even its ugliest impulses look irresistible.

Gallo plays Billy Brown, a recently released convict who kidnaps a young woman (Ricci) and forces her to impersonate his wife during a visit to his spectacularly unpleasant parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara). Billy is controlling, verbally abusive, and almost impossibly self-absorbed, while Ricci's Layla responds to his increasingly appalling behavior with a devotion that seems to defy all reasonable explanation. Their relationship has all the makings of a hostage situation because, of course, that's exactly what it is. Yet Gallo films this grotesque arrangement with the tenderness of a great love story, inviting us to fall in love with a fantasy that ought to make us deeply uncomfortable. The result is a film whose beauty and cruelty are so thoroughly entangled that it's difficult to separate what makes it moving from what makes it disturbing.