No more public exposure: Vincent Gallo puts his films away

A while ago, I wrote here about the sad fate of the movies that graced the world's leading film festivals but never made it into British cinemas. But although it fit the criteria, one movie that went unmentioned was Promises Written in Water, a tale of tortured love from gobby polymath Vincent Gallo which premiered last year in Venice. I simply thought, given the relative fame of its director (and star/writer/producer/editor/composer), it would eventually find some fearless outfit eager to release it.

Well, it turns out it won't, here or anywhere else. And that appears to be the choice of its own prodigiously touchy creator. Specifically, a recent report at The Playlist found Gallo announcing that after a grand total of two festival outings, Promises ... is never to be publicly screened again – because, from here on, "I do not want my new works to be generated in a market or audience of any kind."

It's a stance confirmed by his production company's website, one seemingly applied not just to the movie in question, but another made since that will now never know the simple pleasures of a paying crowd. Instead, says its maker, it is to be "stored [...] without being exposed to the dark energies from the public."

Now for hardened Gallophiles, used as they are to eccentric pronouncements and strange online conduct, all this may elicit a weary roll of the eye of the kind routinely made by Morrissey fans. We are, after all, talking about a man forever caught between open-mouthed awe at the scale of his own talent, and disgust at the world's ongoing failure to make him King of it. But still, I think it's worth noting this particular de facto retirement, and not only because it's being presented as a drastic punishment in which we should all use this time to think seriously about what we've done.

Because the funny thing about that is, for all his cosmic narcissism, Gallo can actually be fantastic. Not on anything like a regular basis, you understand, but far more than he should at all, given that so much that comes out of his mouth makes him resemble the muttering figure you edge away from on the 87 bus reborn as a Manhattan hipster. And yet the music he makes is often wispily gorgeous, his glowering presence instantly makes the films he's in more interesting and, yes, he can direct. His 2003 travelogue, The Brown Bunny, may have been chock-full of self-indulgence – even before he had himself attended to by Chloë Sevigny on camera – but it was also hypnotically woozy, and at the very least the product of a proper, manically auteurist vision.

Better still, once you see the film he made beforehand, the lovely and enduring Buffalo '66, it's impossible to ever quite write off the man responsible, such is the deadpan tenderness with which its romance between Gallo and co-star Christina Ricci unfolds. I'm not sure Ricci would agree, but it was a film made, for all his loathing of the punters, by someone with a knack for charming them.

But no more. Whether it's the principled walkout of a true artistic spirit, or a middle finger raised in a 30-year adolescent snit (or both), the result is that Vincent Gallo is now, to you and I, an ex-director. And Promises Written in Water, the reviews of which suggest a film it would at least be nice to give a spin, is instead to take its place in the same sealed vault many miles underground, housing that other movie locked away from prying eyes by its own obsessive mastermind, Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried. Be careful where you put your dark energies, people.