Pace everyone’s favorite Greek philosopher, Socrates, if the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then the unexamined cam life — as in cam-girl life — is probably a close second or even a distant third.
That lack of self-exploration, of self-examination, and self-analysis permeates writer-director-actor Katarina Zhu’s fascinatingly opaque, ultimately frustrating character study, Bunnylovr, and the singularly named cam-girl character, Rebecca, who Zhu essays in the film.
When we first meet Rebecca, a Chinese-American woman in her mid-twenties, she’s in her (un)natural element, going through the usual cam-girl motions, engaging in banal chit-chat with the lonely, horny users on the other side of the flickering computer screen. It’s purely transactional for Rebecca, a needed supplement to her meager income as an office assistant for a realtor. For the users who pay Rebecca in tokens-for-cash, it’s a short-lived, if addictive, fantasy, a diversion from their dull, sex-free or sex-deficient lives.
Lost somewhere between her carefree college years and whatever comes after, Rebecca drifts through her day-to-day existence, a ghostly presence at best in other people’s lives. Framed in uncomfortable, tightly focused close-ups, Rebecca’s non-cam-girl life includes long, directionless walks through New York City’s Lower East Side and Chinatown, dropping in on her wealthy artist friend Bella’s (Rachel Sennott, Bottoms, Shiva Baby) privileged, unencumbered life, and an occasional unsatisfying hook-up with a self-centered ex, Carter (Jack Kilmer). Rebecca seems to have little going for her except more of the same, prolonged existential angst, inevitably followed by an existential crisis of some kind.
Bunnylovr pushes the dramatically reactionary Rebecca into a semblance of action through two, seemingly unrelated occurrences: Rebecca encounters her long-lost, estranged con-man father, William (Perry Yung), in Chinatown, and also has a rule-breaking online encounter with one of her clients, the appropriately named John (Austin Amelio). Both, in their way, offer the kind of unmediated intimacy missing from Rebecca’s deliberately unexamined life. Both, also in their way, offer significant risk and possibly danger to Rebecca’s emotional and physical well-being.
For William, it’s a terminal diagnosis and pressure for Rebecca to end their estrangement and accept the dying William back into her life without judgment. For John, it’s the tantalizing offer of an out-of-bounds personal gift to Rebecca. He promises the gift, a live rabbit, will assuage the loneliness and incipient despair he sees and hears in Rebecca’s online and on-camera behavior. Both men use Rebecca’s needs, one for family connection, the other for emotional intimacy, to manipulate her into making choices against her better interests.
The life-altering choices Rebecca ultimately makes, realistic and grounded in William’s, far less so in John’s (Rebecca forgets the warning implicit in “stranger danger”) threaten to derail an otherwise insightful, provocative character study. Zhu’s preference for elliptical, episodic storytelling bordering on the interstitial or the inconsequential, leaving questions either unanswered or entirely unasked, often work to undermine whatever emotional impact or poignancy Zhu presumably intended Bunnylovr to have.
Still, Zhu shows incredible promise as a visual storyteller and a performer capable of great subtlety and nuance. As a writer, Zhu also shows promise, though there’s obvious room for growth to develop characters and narratives with greater depth and dimension.
Bunnylovr premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Visit the film's page at the official festival site for more information.