July 14, 2009: Brüno
Brüno, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s in-concept follow-up to 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, takes another of his characters from Da Ali G Show and expands the character’s universe to include a feature-length adventure. Again we have an opinionated, socially awkward and horribly politically incorrect foreigner taking the USA by storm on a quest which takes him through the big cities and the deep south for reality-comedy hijinks arising from shocking prejudice and rampant American nationalism.
Title character Brüno is a gay fashion reporter from Austria, who has recently been fired from his weekly TV show and decides he needs to go to America for the purpose of gaining fame. The particulars of this pursuit are neither here nor there, aside from setting the stage for a flamboyant romp across the USA. Brüno tries to be a good person and bring disparate groups together (Israelis and Palestinians) in awkward and out-of-place segments, he tries to experience different cultures throughout America, and eventually decides that in order to become famous he needs to become a heterosexual because clearly no Hollywood stars are gay (based on his cited examples including Tom Cruise and John Travolta…hint hint). This conveniently sets up a number of scenes with puritanical and bigoted southern US officials and groups.
The movie is very funny at times, and unabashedly crude, but I really can’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already planning to see it. This is a pale imitator of Borat, partly because the premise has been done before and the shock value has partly worn off, and partly because it’s harder to tell here whether the humour is all in good fun or at someone’s expense. Borat was such an exaggerated character, and the skewering so widely spread across different prejudices and attitudes, that it was clear that the ridiculousness was the point and nobody needed to take actual offense. With Brüno, we’re forced to try and figure out whether this is incisive commentary or just easy gay-bashing. I don’t think that Sacha Baron Cohen sets out to create a homophobic film, but the targets are a little too easy, and general societal discomforts are too conveniently exploited, and it becomes hard to tell whether the film is denigrating homophobia or merely joining in. Add to this the fact that North American audiences seem to have a hard time dealing with male nudity, gay or not, which blurs the line about what people are reacting to. There was a woman in the theatre audience who couldn’t stop saying “Oh my God” out loud to the outrageous things she saw on screen, and it was clearly an unconscious reaction, but is it because of what she really feels, or what she’s been conditioned to feel, or what she feels she needs to express in order to have her friends not think she’s weird?
Brüno tries, and in a few scenes it succeeds. However, the concept is not fresh, the plot, such as it is, doesn’t flow as naturally as it did in Borat (keep in mind that I’m comparing to a film in which a cross-country pursuit of Pamela Anderson based on a chance TV viewing of Baywatch was a main plotline), and opportunity for parody with this character is far more one-dimensional than with Borat, which limits the potential for the film and makes it clear why Borat was the first choice of the Ali G characters to be brought to the big screen.
Disappointing, but I can understand why.
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