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Bruno

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Cert: 18

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Dir: Larry Charles. Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Clifford Banagale, Gustaf Hammarsten

 

Description: Sacha Baron Cohen dresses to impress and distress as his ultra-gay and flamboyant fashionista from Klagenfurt in Austria. With cameras present to capture every strangled vowel, Bruno wreaks havoc in a series of carefully orchestrated situations, including appearing on a real life talk show to discuss becoming the father of his first black baby and running amok on the catwalks of Milan.

Country: US. 2009. 82mins

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Brüno is looking so good

 

Stupendous silliness: Sacha Baron Cohen satirises the fashion world as Brüno — but his real target is vanity

Poser: Brüno glams it up

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f the movie you are watching is so embarrassing you have to watch it through your fingers, can you still say you enjoyed it? The latest from Sacha Baron Cohen is the test. Mortification has a long history in the entertainment business: from the riot that greeted The Rite of Spring to the jeers that accompanied Lenny Bruce to the on-air antics of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. Along the way people have spat at Manet’s paintings, torn up copies of Ulysses, banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood and asked questions in Parliament about Chris Morris’s Brass Eye. More recently, there was the sight of Borat, a stranger in America, the ultimate foreigner, who became famous by making audiences feel they might expire from shame.

Now we have Brüno, a character so arse-shatteringly embarrassing he makes Borat look like Barack Obama, the heart and soul of poise and discretion. Brüno is more mortifying than Donald Trump’s hair, a contestant on Big Brother or Jordan in her present incarnation, but anyhow: Austria’s self-proclaimed “biggest thing since Hitler” is now among us, so you’d better prepare to see every conservative taboo ripped to shreds before your peeping eyes.

Brüno is one of those fake-tanned, depilated, eyebrow-plucked tragedians who reliably populate the world of fashion. When we first meet him he is presenting a show in Austria called Funkyzeit Mit Brüno, where our hero tries to get the lowdown on the upswings of international fashion daftness.

The thing about fashion is that, for all its stupendous silliness, it likes to take itself very seriously indeed: all those desperate models and thick designers in their Crimplene headdresses think of themselves as deathless artists, so of course it’s quite a joy to see Brüno arriving at Milan Fashion Week wearing a suit made entirely out of Velcro. He causes catwalk chaos at the show of Spanish designer Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, before being thrown on to the street. Brüno has committed fashion suicide. He must try America.

After the fame of Borat, any future production of Baron Cohen’s was going to be a test of survival. Much like Borat, the film takes the form of a series of encounters enjoyed by Brüno (but seldom by his guests). Some of them are interviews, or mock interviews, where the person being interviewed is unaware they are the victim of a huge hoax.The attempt to get a film made when he was so recognisable would inevitably become the subject of the movie, and this is so in Brüno, where the stunts seem to be dictated less by an impressively scripted journey than by the provocations and limitations constituted by real-life events. The people Brüno sends up really want to kill him — they are being hoodwinked, after all, or forcibly disillusioned, or morally mugged — and part of what powers the entertainment in Baron Cohen’s movies is one’s admiration for the star’s bravery.

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In this movie the big target is homophobia but the less obvious one is vanity. The reason so many famous types are willing to be interviewed by a “media personality” like Brüno is that they can’t say no, even to an Austrian fashionista.

That is the first great gag in every interview scene. Then we have Paula Abdul agreeing to be interviewed about her humanitarian work in a house without furniture but with Mexican workers as “chairs”. Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul agrees to be interviewed in a hotel room, where Brüno, all a-giggle, proceeds to remove his fashion pants. The panicky Paul makes you wince and crease as he shouts in the corridor about the queer hitting on him.

Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles are constantly trying to find ways to shock their audience into full consciousness. They take Brüno to the Middle East and he outrages Jews by sashaying around a Hasidic neighbourhood in a midriff-revealing Jewish costume that looked like a tribute to early Britney. He then meets in Bethlehem with a Muslim terrorist group who are so baffled by his camp and ridiculous questions they throw him out.

This is existential comedy at its best. You spend your time not only enjoying the joke but also wondering how he will survive it and progress from it, which is the only sort of narrative a character like Brüno can hope for. The film is episodic, at times puerile, messy and forced, but none of this detracts from its brilliant deployment of Brüno as an absurd social and political x-ray. We might cringe at Brüno but what we’re really mortified by is the behaviour of the people revealed by his journey.

At one point he auditions parents who seek celebrity photographic work for their children. He invites them to give their assent to their child being photographed in more and more dangerous situations, including being crucified and wearing a Nazi uniform, and the parents nod in agreement and say that would be fine.

Brüno’s sexuality is his main calling card, and he whips it out, as it were, every time he gets the chance. Actually, he whips it out mainly when he doesn’t have the chance, which causes enormous consternation among everybody from American hotel staff to a bunch of macho hunters in Alabama. Brüno’s session with a homosexuality counsellor — ie converter — is a sustained, bravura piece of comical piss-taking.

By turning himself into the world’s most absurd person, Baron Cohen finds a way to reveal deeper and more threatening absurdities strewn across the respectable surface of society. This is his gift and he deploys it in Brüno to amazing effect.
In what is probably the best and most provocative sequence in the movie, Brüno, devoid of all his finery (he is trying not to be gay), appears at a Blue Collar Brawlin’ evening in Arkansas. This is basically cage-fighting, where hetero-loving, beer-guzzling nutcases punch hell out of each other in a wire cage. I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say Baron Cohen causes an upset, and the sight of him doing so is bound to be one of the cinematic riots of the year.

Brüno is a brave and necessary comedy. The film will appear to be a succès de scandale, and will outrage many people, but it is actually just a success, a film with an instinct for naming and shaming a host of overprotected wrongs. Go and see it.

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