A-List Movie Review Maxout Mit Brüno!

Five years ago, if you had asked me what the odds were of a guerrilla pseudo-documentary starring a Cambridge-educated British comedian, rated 18A, and featuring several extended sequences of explicit gay sex becoming one of the most anticipated films of 2009... well, I would have kept my betting money in my pocket.

But Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to his surprise blockbuster smash Borat, is now playing packed theatres. I caught the film on opening night with Michael Hingston, one of my fellow movie writers at SEE Magazine in Edmonton, and sat down afterward with him to share our thoughts on the spectacle we'd just witnessed.

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Paul: This was my first exposure to the Brüno character, a flamboyantly gay, extremely shallow, not terribly smart Austrian television host who sort of embodies the fame-hungry vapidity of the fashion world. Unlike you, I’ve never seen Da Ali G Show, where the character debuted, but the conventional wisdom seems to be that of the three characters on that show — Ali G, Borat, and Brüno — Brüno is the weakest of the bunch. Would you agree with that?

Michael: Definitely. I think all of these characters work on shock value, and the laughs really come from the gut — your id, not your superego. And it just seems funnier to me in theory to see how far people will go to put up with someone who talks in crazy British hip hop slang like Ali G, or some well-meaning but unbelievably offensive foreigner like Borat. The joke that “I’m gay, so I don’t understand straight taboos” seems to end before it begins; it’s also the stereotype that, of the three, has been the most thoroughly debunked by pop culture already. I will give Cohen enormous credit, though, for his commitment to the character — whenever he sees an opportunity to explode a bombshell of crassness, he goes for it. But he also seems far too willing to fall back on cocksucking jokes.

Paul: Well, let’s not forget that this movie contains some excellent cocksucking jokes. That montage at the start of the movie showing Brüno’s home life with his pygmy Filipino lover is pretty inspired. It is like the most overheated fantasy of all the crazy stuff gay men do to each other. At the same time, I wonder if it makes Cohen’s satire a little incoherent — if one of the goals of the film is to expose North Americans’ latent homophobia, then what does it mean when Brüno turns out to live up to all those homophobic stereotypes? He really is promiscuous and shallow and sexually insatiable and unfit to be a parent.

Michael: I don’t even know if homophobia is the right word for what Cohen’s pranks are revealing. He’s goading his subjects. There’s a bit where Brüno decides that if he wants to achieve his goal of becoming über-famous (maximum umlauts!), he needs to be straight, so he goes to see these ministers who promise that they can convert gays into heterosexuals. And you think, “Yeah! Those are horrible people!” By all means, tell that minister he has “great blowjob lips,” because you want to see his eye twitch as he stews in his own uncomfortable juices. But that’s the exception here, not the rule. I mean, every time someone who’s black or Jewish gets killed, it’s not necessarily a hate crime. Similarly, if you get mad at some guy who derails the ultimate fighting cage match you’ve paid to see with some crazy gay makeout scene... you can call that bigotry if you like, but mostly Brüno is just being annoying.

Paul: Some of the strongest scenes in the film have no gay content at all. There’s a bit, for instance, where Brüno visits these two amazingly stupid PR consultants who specialize in hooking celebrities up with charities — I don’t know how these women even stay in business when they can’t even pronounce “Darfur.” And there’s a scene where Brüno needs some babies for a photo shoot he’s planning, and he auditions a series of parents who are appallingly willing to agree to the most outrageous requests.

Michael: “Does your baby have a problem operating large, antiquated machinery?” “No, she’s great with that.”

Paul: I think “Does your baby have a problem being near lit phosphorus?” was my favourite.

Michael: To me, that’s the best scene in the entire movie. And to their credit, Cohen and the director, Larry Charles, seem to recognize when they’ve got a good hook. And in that scene, you really see the horrific underbelly of a world where people have no moral qualms whatsoever about peddling their own children. When Brüno asks one mother if she’d consider giving her 30-pound baby liposuction to lose 10 pounds, she literally says, “Yes, if it gets her the job.” That is the most chilling documentary scene I’ve seen in years, and you can only get there with a foil like Brüno. Let me ask you, to what degree were you suspicious of what you were seeing?

Paul: You mean, the extent to which various scenes were staged? It was certainly something I was thinking about in practically every scene and which maybe distracted me from laughing in a few cases. The first scene with Brüno’s agent in L.A., for instance, contains so much plot exposition that I was pretty sure the agent was fictional. But then there’s a later scene that’s staged in such way to make you believe he’s not in on the joke after all. Then there’s a scene where Brüno gets a job as an extra on Medium that I’m sure had to be completely phony. You know what? I’d almost rather see a version of Brüno that jettisoned the fictional veneer and was simply a documentary about Sacha Baron Cohen traveling around the country and going into these situations and doing these Brüno stunts. You’d still get the impact of the comedy, the sociological experiment would still be intact, but there wouldn’t be these lingering, distracting questions about what’s real and what isn’t.

Michael: It’s true: he doesn’t really give you enough foundation to judge a lot of the comedy. When Paula Abdul shows up, she’s clearly not in on the joke and runs away, but at the end of the movie, there’s an all-star charity song featuring Bono and Sting and Elton John, and they’re clearly Cohen’s famous friends, all of whom are in on it. And I have to say, that scene smacks of a kind of latent elitism. I mean, Sacha Baron Cohen is now famous. He has all these contacts he can pull in, and there is something seedy about that — he can make fun of Paula Abdul because she’s not as famous as Sting. Let’s not forget that Cohen himself lived on the lower rungs of celebrity for many years.

Paul: We’re raising a lot of objections to the film, but I have to say, I cannot say enough about Cohen’s performance. It is phenomenal how he remains firmly in character within these wild, unpredictable situations. I don’t know if he has destroyed some kind of self-censoring mechanism within his brain or if he’s actually some kind of comedy sociopath, but it takes a special kind of fearlessness to go out on a hunting trip the way Cohen does, with this group of small-town Alabama rednecks, and look up at the stars and say, “Makes you think of all the hot guys out there in the world.”

Michael: Or to show up naked at their tent in the middle of the night asking if he can come in and sleep with them.

Paul: “A bear ate all my clothes.” I would not have it in me to deliberately, willingly court the antagonism of so many people the way Cohen does.

Michael: I do have to wonder, though, whether Brüno, by being literally the gayest thing imaginable, is not so much drawing out homophobia as he is creating homophobia.

Paul: It’s so hard to unpack. In a way, I think Cohen’s character in Talladega Nights is a much sharper, more coherent satire of American homophobia and how the character’s mere presence destabilizes all these red-blooded NASCAR guys around him. Nathan Rabin at The Onion A.V. Club raised a good point: because Cohen is Jewish, he could get away with jokes like Borat getting up and singing a song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” But Cohen is not actually gay, so with Brüno, there can’t help but be an element of minstrelsy in his performance.

Michael: It strikes me as a dangerous movie in that sense. When Cohen does hit his targets, it’s an incredibly subtle, nuanced stand against homophobia or xenophobia. But I feel like there were a lot of people around us in the theatre who were not getting those nuances.

Paul: Cohen doesn’t give a lot of interviews that aren’t in character. Do you think, if you pinned him down, he’d be able to give a coherent explanation of what Brüno’s themes are? Would he just say, “It’s all pranks and whatever happens, happens”? Or would he say, “I believe America is deeply homophobic, and I created this character in order to demonstrate that fact, and I designed these various situations in this specific way to achieve these particular effects”?

Michael: He’s clearly a very intelligent guy with such talent and commitment and craft that he is certainly aware of the themes he’s unpacking. At the same time... you know, he’s English, so why did he go to America? Because it’s simply an easier target, I think.

Paul: Well, that begs the question of where he goes from here. Would a scripted satire have anywhere near the cultural impact that Cohen has had with Borat and Brüno?

Michael: I don’t know. I think this style of comedy documentary might not have anymore legs to it. Cohen’s such a gifted performer, but what can he do now that’s not a step down? I showed up an hour early for this movie because I thought it would sell out, and it almost did! They’re showing it every hour.

Paul: I believe Cohen has said that he’s so famous at this point that if he were to do another project like this one, he’d have to go to eastern Europe or someplace like that so as not to be recognized immediately.

Michael: Kazakhstan, perhaps?