Movie Review of Bruno

Sunday, July 26

OK, last night I succumbed. I saw Bruno, starring Sasha Baron Cohen, late of "Borat" fame. This time he portrays a very gay Austrian fashionista, host of "Funkyzeit", an embarrassingly bad Euro-Trash icon.

After Bruno disastrously crashes a Milan fashion show, he becomes a fashion persona non grata, and is expelled from shows forever. These are all real incidents, captured Candid Camera-style. He then decides to re-invent himself in LA, and the next few shticks explore his efforts to elevate himself out of the D-list at the expense of unwary Americans.

Whether or not Bruno is your type of comedy, you have to give enormous credit to the relentless film-making style of Cohen. His genius is to push beyond the limits of convention and propriety to score points about the absurdity of our society.

Some of the set-ups in the film are enormously courageous, as when Cohen goes hunting with an unsuspecting group of rednecks to demonstrate his new-found "masculinity". Suffice it to say there are some tense moments by the campfire after Bruno lisps: "You know guys, I've never ever been out of the city before."

Between the threat of actual physical violence (as when Cohen is whipped mercilessly by a leather-belt wielding predatory female when he goes to a hetero swingers party to "reform" his sexuality) to the specter of retaliatory lawsuits and actual encounters with police, this is bravura film-making, like it or not.

Another daring piece of documentary takes place when the character cage-fights a gay opponent in a scary rural Southern arena. The "fight" devolves into an excruciatingly public homosexual smooch-fest on the canvas, and the audience goes nuts, throwing beer and chairs into the cage--their expressions captured on film are reminiscent of the brutal scowls on the faces of Roman soldiers in a Brueghel crucifixion painting.

Less appealing, and the movie's low-note, is when Cohen "pranks" Congressman Ron Paul into an interview, which quickly devolves into a tacky attempt at homosexual seduction. Paul ends up fleeing the scene, yelling "He's a queer!" and one can't help feeling sorry for him. Bruno's comic voiceover rationalization that he thought he was coming on to transvestite supermodel Ru Paul comes off as pretty lame.

In an effort to get publicity, Bruno embraces a "cause" and adopts an African baby, who he parades at an actual screening of the Richard Bey show (unsuspectingly, they booked him under the provocative rubric of Single Gay Interracial Dad). The audience is entirely black, and they are enraged when Bruno trots out his trophy child, a black infant he names "OJ", wearing a sequined T-shirt inscribed "Gayby". Hooting and hollering, the audience shouts its approval when at the show's climax, a uniformed black female officer of the Texas Department of Child Welfare shows up to take the child away into protective custody.

Despondent, Bruno is restrained by TV studio bouncers, and then trudges off toward the nearest diner, where he tries to commit "carbicide". Before he chows down on pie a la mode with whipped cream, he notes wistfully that he hasn't had any carbs for the last fourteen years. The gathered regulars, most of them obese, watch in astonishment as the lithe fashionista, garbed in a sleeveless leopard skin top and tight-fitting leather pants, devours an entire table-full of calorie-laden junk. The place where it was filmed is real, a popular middle-America chain called the Village Inn Restaurant.

True to Borat form, Bruno was as much of a wince-fest as a laugh-fest. There are some painful moments as Cohen pushes the bounds of humor past the red zone. Depending on your squeamishness quotient, this movie may or may not be for you. But I found it a brilliant and daring expose of bigotry and political correctness--no group escapes Cohen's pile-driving comic instincts.