She's one of the few baby-stars who survived the adolescence. He's a standoffish and self-destructive aspiring movie star. Apparently incompatible, also physically, The Ice storm's plump rebel and The Funeral's lanky guy show, in Buffalo '66, a harmony that surpasses the one of many beautiful and charming couples.

Nothing in common, at least in real life. He, Vincent Gallo, is a 35-year-old -man of proletarian descent, a lanky guy, a pair of blue eyes on an odd and irregular face. A man who enjoys astonishing you with such statements as this: "I'm afraid of nothing, so I don't build barriers around me. The only one thing I protect is my penis: I consider it of great account ".

She, Christina Ricci, is a Californian upper middle-class girl (mother model, father attorney), an ex-baby star just come of age, 5' 3" tall and somewhat buxom. Still wrestling with growth problems: "For a long time I felt I would die. When you grow you lose something, irretrievably. You die, and you can't understand if you are going to be born again, and how".

Incompatible. And nevertheless they found themselves on the screen--in Buffalo '66, Gallo's first work--and formed a perfect couple. Or better, the perfect non-couple for the confused 90s. In the film they keep together in the name of pretence and appearances, they play being someone else, but without passion, without sex. Only in the end, a crumb of tenderness. Understanding an immeasurably great loneliness and an unexpressed need for love.

" I have never loved anybody and I have never permitted somebody to love me " says sharply Gallo . " And when somebody did it, I punished them. I'm a cold person, I need nothing and nobody. I eliminated the need. Since I was three". He likes playing the maudit, the rebel without a cause and without redemption, remembering that " when I was 16 I wanted to kill myself, but then I thought that someone would come and take away all my things". So he confined himself to going away and multiplying: first to New York, then Europe. First rocker ( he played with Jean Michel Basquiat, a graffiti artist grown in Andy Warhol's entourage) then photographer, a certain success painter, at last actor. Or better, "a movie star", like he defines himself with a certain subtle contempt. Because, even if he enjoyed a certain notoriety -- he was one of the comical robbers in Palookaville and the dead brother in Ferrara's The Funeral-- he says: "I feel insecure about acting only, not about anything else ". While as a director he already thinks to be a little tin god: "I have no reference points, neither masters, I do not copy like all the others do. I made a film in the same way I would paint my home: with a fanatic perfectionism". Therefore he "fairly" distributes contempt for the brood of actors -- directors and narcissistic satisfaction for his being a natural artist. " John Turturro, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins are interested in being lucky only, in having success as actors. And they transferred their mania for success to mediocre films, works that don't have in the slightest degree, the intelligence of my film. I have never gone to a dramatic school, never gone to university, I haven't either completed high school. I am without solid, strong foundation, I must always work on chaos, on spontaneity, on impulse, on instinct".

Also Christina Ricci talks much about work, a whole life filtered through her actress experience. On the other hand she began acting at 7, in a school performance, at 9 she was alongside Cher in Sirens, then becoming a vaguely cemeterial baby-star: first the mournful Wednesday in The Addams family (and its sequel) , then face to face with a ghost, even if plump easy-going like Casper. And yet she too, as Gallo does, uses speech as a scalpel and talks about herself with pitiless sincerit : "When I was a little girl I thought that everything was good and fair, that people around me wanted to do something good for me only. I was stupid to think so , especially living in the show business. When I was a little girl I met directors who went on treating me as a 5 child , who can't understand, who can't hear. When I was bigger I met a desperate one: " Shit !" he told me," you have boobs. This is a children's film: what can we do with your boobs?" "How should they know about childhood, about what you think when you're a child? How should they know about my teens? Therefore I have learned, I split up. I became the Fantastic Multiform Girl: tough and mature at work, a normal teenager outside the set. At least, I think to be normal".

Work, always work. Against loneliness, to hide the soul. " I became a director because I love having all under control", confesses Gallo. "Life, you can't control it. In life I love two things only: kissing and eating . They are the only things there's no pain in ".

Superwork for Ricci, too. In a year she acted in 5 films, beyond Buffalo '66: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Opposite of Sex, Pecker, Desert Blue, 200 Cigarettes. "Completed high school and before joining the university, gayly she says, " I had a sabbatical year. I made one film and then the other and so on. In any case if I don't work I don't enjoy myself, I get bored".They were all adult roles, often as a restless teenager, the one in The Opposite of Sex, very erotic: "That film was rewarding for me, she admits, I had already astonished the conformist when they saw the Casper's sweet little girl having intercourse with The Ice storm's two brothers. It is my body that was rewarded. There was a moment in which everybody, looking at me in disgust, was going on saying: " Hell! You're really fat ! " Instead Don Ross, the director, on set told me: " I want to show more of your body ". A magnific sensation: I was accepted, at last".

To accept , to be accepted. Gallo, who shot Buffalo '66 in his hometown almost like "a gesture of grudge" against his parents, takes care not to consider his film "therapeutical". But the fist person he showed it is the analyst whose treatment he has been under for 11 years. And now he is planning his second film, The Brown Bunny , whose lead seems to take after him a lot: " a sex-addict , a tragic and self-destructive soul". Instead Ricci is making an important step: she's going to write and direct her first film, Asylum, that is just about the end of childhood as an apparent death. Waiting to be born again different. The "bad" lanky guy and the plump girl decidedly get on very well together: opposite but parallel, unaware couple looking for the same light .