Lady Eleanor Goes to Sundance: A Bunnylovr Review

A masterfully crafted narrative, potent, subtle performances, and a raw visual language frame protagonist Rebecca’s exploration of intimacy in a mood of loneliness. 

By creating a close intimacy between the audience and the protagonist, Bunnylovr unfolds how Becca’s search for connection through sexual intimacy, familial intimacy, and platonic intimacy leads to her looking inward and developing her relationship with herself. 

Bunnylovr opens on the sound of clattering coins and the provocative visual of fishnet-wrapped skin, as, streaming as a cam girl, Becca poses for a group session on a pornographic website. Perhaps one may expect an element of hyper-sexuality from a film about a cam girl, and yet this film’s interrogation of transactional exploitation fills the sexual intimacy with a resounding sense of emptiness. 

Because of the intimate visual language that binds us to Becca and the subtle nuance of her performance, though there is a pervasive presence of a sexualizing gaze, we are never participating in that gaze with the men who sexualize Becca. We are not watching the sex, but the loneliness of explicit scenes, reading into her micro-expressions. We notice the flatness in her voice as she regurgitates sexual phrases for clients, the reluctance and guilt that flashes across her face when sexual requests push beyond her comfort level, and the fear pooling in her eyes when she feels searching fingers graze her leg. 

Beginning with the messages in from the opening scene’s group session, we watch Becca seek real intimacy in her intensifying relationship with one client.  The dialogue and performances of their increasingly intimate dynamic unveil so much about Becca’s yearning for connection. At first, they begin on the superficial exchange of her exposing her body on camera to a nameless man with his camera off. Slowly, they become increasingly vulnerable together: he sends her a rabbit as a gift, they begin to chat with frequency, he reveals his face and name, John. 

This intensifying relationship allows the film to dive deeper into its interrogation of the brilliantly executed core conflict of the film: Becca wants to be seen and that yearning leads her to permit a transactional exploitation of her image that only makes her feel all the more invisible. 

We see how Becca’s vulnerability pushes her past the boundaries she’s set for herself in search of intimacy not through increasing sexual favors but through what John asks her to do to her pet bunny. Asked to position her rabbit sexually and inflict physical harm upon it for his sexual gratification, we see, through a powerful metaphor, Becca betray herself. 

Even as Rebecca begins to reconnect with her father, their exchanges feel tinged with a transactional superficiality as he calls her his lucky charm and gives her a cut of his gambling earnings. His failure to meet her for a movie only salts her abandonment wounds. It is only within the blues tones and beeping machines of his hospital deathbed that we feel we see a moment of connection between them. 

Rebecca’s friendship with Bella is rendered as a lonely one, largely through the breathtaking performances of Katarina Zhu and Rachel Sennot. In body language and awkward dialogue, we see the ways that Becca is unable to be vulnerable with her friend, keeping her guard up and making excuses to get out of plans. When Rebecca is able to show up for Bella’s art exhibition, we discover that Bella has violated the intimacy of their friendship, exploiting her image in a nude portrait and speaking to her with a condescending dismissiveness. The narrative draws a powerful parallel between the exploitative gaze imposed upon Becca by clients and the exploitative gaze imposed upon Becca by her artist friend. Though the friends reconnect after Becca’s father passes, it is clear that what platonic intimacy remains with Bella cannot be the answer to Becca’s profound emptiness. 

Cerulean, baby, royal, throughout the film, shades of blue represent an aching sense of loneliness. Rebecca wears her loneliness in a wardrobe of blues, from the blue hoodie she dons throughout her lowest moments, the blue paper gown she wears within the vulnerability of the OBGYN, to the blue bow she ties around Milk.

Staying with Becca throughout the film, we see what is unseen–the moments she picks her ear, sniffs her underwear, urinates on the toilet, and pleasures herself while plagued by anxiety. In our intimate view of Becca, we watch her evolve from self-destruction to self-love. And thus, the answer to her invisibility is double.

 Rebecca’s loneliness persists and yet, in the final moments where she chooses herself over self-destructive options, our love story finds it’s triumphant end anyway. She has found self-love. 

Though it is neither autobiographical nor nonfiction, Bunnylovr is a story beautifully written, directed, and acted by Katarina Zhu, which makes this a deeply personal debut feature. 

There is such power in Zhu making visible the human story beneath this film. In watching Bunnylovr and resonating with Becca, we further destroy her antagonistic sense of invisibility and exploitative gaze. We see her intimately, complexly. We see her beyond her sexuality.