Larry Charles (2009)

I’m not a big fan of Anthony Lane’s film reviews for The New Yorker:  clearly more perceptive and independent-minded than his stablemate David Denby, he often prefers to remind you he’s a witty wordsmith at the expense of saying much about the picture he’s reviewing.   But Lane can be very good when he’s moved to write seriously about a bad film that isn’t negligible and his review of Brüno is a case in point.  It’s pretty well spot on – and interesting given Lane’s enthusiasm for the same team’s Borat (which I’ve not seen).   I’d read the piece before I saw Brüno and, I guess because I was already predisposed not to like the film (although the trailer had made me laugh), I had some of Lane’s thoughts in mind when I entered the cinema.   A lot of what follows here echoes what he’s already written.

The business of celebrity is one of Brüno’s satirical targets but Sacha Baron Cohen is feeding from the hand he’s biting:  the unifying flaw of the people he fools is that they don’t know Baron Cohen well enough to avoid the trap.  (This assumes that the ostensible dupes are never in on the joke, although there were at least a couple of sequences in the film – those involving the National Guard and a swinger party – that made me wonder about that.)    This implicit double standard becomes explicit in the closing sequence, when Brüno, having achieved celebrity, teams up with Bono, Sting and Elton John.  They clearly know what they’re doing – performing a pastiche humanitarian charity song, ‘Dove of Peace’ – and are enjoying it as much as Baron Cohen.  (The line-up for this number also includes Snoop Dogg and Chris Martin from Coldplay:  I didn’t recognise either of them, and hadn’t even heard of the other participant, Slash from Velvet Revolver.  I guess this further confuses the significance of celebrity in the picture.)   The better-known gulls we meet along the way include Paula Abdul, the Republican congressman Ron Paul, various minor players in American film and television, and spokesmen for the political-military causes of Israel and Palestine.  (I imagine that 99.9% of the British audience for Brüno – and not much less of the global audience – will, like me, recognise only Paula Abdul among this group.)  The dupes also include lots of ‘ordinary’ people, quite a few of whom look far from well off and sound less than well educated.

Brüno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter, first appeared as one of Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters in 1998, in television sketches.  In Brüno, after an incident at the Milan Fashion Week, he loses his job on the TV fashion programme ‘Funkyzeit’ and is ‘schwarz-listed’ by the industry.  (The Teutonic jokes – apart from Brüno’s early self-comparisons with Hitler – are almost entirely linguistic, and not up to much.)  He makes his way to Los Angeles to become a celebrity with his ‘assistant’s assistant’ Lutz in devoted, sexually hopeful attendance.  (Lutz’s unkempt drabness complements Brüno’s day-glo plumage.)  There are excursions to the Middle East (‘Middle Earth’) to try for a peace deal which will make Brüno’s name; and a stop-off in Africa, with the same aim in mind, for a black baby (whom Brüno calls OJ).  Back in the US, Brüno’s appearance on a Texas TV talk show ends with his losing the baby to social services.  Still a nonebrity, Brüno disposes of Lutz and realises that what he needs to do to become a star is turn straight (like ‘Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kevin Spacey’).  This entails counselling by ‘gay converters’, a martial arts session, the National Guard training, a hunting expedition and the swinger party.  The treatment works and, in what can only be called the climax of the picture, the straightened Brüno hosts an event (a ‘cage-fight match’ according to Wikipedia), billed as Straight Dave’s Man Slammin’ Maxout, where he incites the audience to chant ‘Straight pride, straight pride!’ (Many of them wear T-shirts emblazoned with this slogan or one similar.)  A lone voice from the crowd calls out ‘Faggot!’ and Straight Dave demands that the caller reveal himself.  It’s Lutz, who enters the cage, at which point Straight Dave/Brüno reverts spectacularly.  To the audience’s horror, the two men strip and make love:  the event is an international news and YouTube sensation and Brüno’s celebrity is sealed.  The last shots before the ‘Dove of Peace’ closing credits show Brüno in a scene of domestic bliss with Lutz and the recovered OJ.

Sacha Baron Cohen stacks the odds in his favour.  He gives people plenty of time to reveal their stupidity and/or prejudices, often in a shrilly aggressive way.  Once they do so, he’s won.  If the people he interviews remain polite and eagerly co-operative – like the gay-converting pastor or the martial arts instructor – Baron Cohen draws proceedings to a close.  Because he does it with a punchline, he’s probably won again, as far as many people in the audience are concerned.  But the punchline occasionally sounds as if prepared for this eventuality and always means ‘This isn’t working out – cut’.  One of the most fruitful sequences from Baron Cohen’s point of view is a montage of Brüno’s interviews with parents so eager for their baby to appear in crucifixion photographs with OJ – in the thieves’ positions – that they’re willing to agree to whatever conditions Brüno lays down.  (These include a stipulation that the infant lose a third of its body weight – 30 pounds – in a week and, if that fails, has liposuction.)  Even allowing for the fact that we expect this breed of parent to be capable of the unthinkable, these people are startling.  But their appearance is immediately followed by the Texas talk show sequence, where the African-American studio audience starts catcalling when Brüno claims he can seduce any man among them.  The audience ends up walking out of the studio after he’s revealed the baby’s name, described how he acquired OJ (in exchange for a MacBook Pro), etc.  You don’t need to be a thick bigot to react in the way the talk-show audience does but these people are made to seem laughable, as if they were no different from the pathologically limelight-hungry parents we’ve just seen.  Within the film’s terms, they are no different:  they’ve been taken in.  Not being taken in is no defence either.  In the abortive pilot for his TV show, Brüno promises viewers an interview with Harrison Ford, who then appears momentarily, telling him to fuck off.  Anyone caught on camera is in effect grist to Baron Cohen’s mill:  by failing to be duped, Ford becomes a humourless spoilsport.

Whether Brüno is homophobic I find hard to say.  The character of Brüno clearly confirms some (ancient) gay stereotypes but the film relentlessly ridicules the various homophobes on display while expecting us to root for Brüno; and he and Lutz are eventually the happy couple.  Gustaf Hammarsten’s performance as Lutz, which is sensitive as well as funny, does a lot to reduce the charges of homophobia and contradicts Anthony Lane’s view that the film sees the sex but not the love in gay life:  Hammarsten suggests both.  It’s striking, however, that Baron Cohen, in spite of his supposed satiric fearlessness, stops short of one of the potentially juiciest confrontations and the possibility of presenting homophobes as seriously pernicious rather than risibly benighted.  When Brüno and Lutz escape in bondage gear from a hotel (they got detained there after losing the key to the contraption which locked them together), they run into a group of placard-wielding anti-gay campaigners.  This is a purely slapstick moment – there’s no verbal interaction. (The ‘straight pride’ crowd, yelling support for Straight Dave then baying for Brüno’s blood, are more understandably kept at a safe distance outside the cage where Brüno and Lutz consummate their union.)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s presence and reputation dominate proceedings to the extent that I realise I’ve written this note without attributing anything in the movie either to the director, who is hardly a negligible name, or to any of the four co-writers (Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer, Jeff Schaffer and Peter Baynham).  Apart from clips of Da Ali G Show and Borat and his (effective) caricature in Sweeney Todd, I’d not seen Baron Cohen in action before.   It’s no surprise that he’s a selfish performer, even if the people he guys are blind to his being a performer at all.  But does the latter point really mean much and is Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy all that radical?  He’s been using the same technique for years now (and Chris Morris was doing something similar on Brass Eye at least as long ago).  He doesn’t seem interested in altering our (or his) assumptions about particular types; and, as Anthony Lane says, his choice of types to lampoon here is far from challenging.  Besides, it seemed to me that when people turned on Brüno this was sometimes – with the rednecks on the hunting expedition, for example – less an illustration of the prejudices which justify their appearance in the film than a reasonable reaction to how annoying Brüno is.  You wouldn’t have to feel threatened by overt homosexuality to lose your patience in the face of his overbearing persistence.  Elsewhere, the comical acquiescence of some of the dupes seems to reflect not much more than the natural, tentative co-operativeness of many people when they’re on camera but not entirely sure why.  (When that’s combined with the professional wariness of the Israeli and Palestinian disputants, it’s not astonishing that they end up holding hands at Brüno’s bidding.)  Brüno has plenty of funny moments but its ‘daring’ seems to reside more in the film’s physical, occasionally genital details than in its substance.

21 July 2009