Let’s get one thing clear upfront: Brüno isn’t as good as Borat. Overall, it’s not as funny, though is has sequences of sublime ridiculousness — and is probably funnier than most of what reaches our screens. The character of Brüno doesn’t work as well as Borat for the kind of agent-provocateur humour generated by Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of both.
It’s partly because Brüno as a movie feels less focused, more diffuse, than Borat. Yet the basic format is the same: just as Borat, a television personality, so to speak, from a wildly libelled Kazakhstan, went to the United States in search of love (I think it was), so Brüno, a madly camp television personality from Austria, goes to the US in search of fame. Both journey through the Land of the Free (though Brüno also traverses Europe and the Middle East, with a stopover in Africa), getting into all sorts of weird scrapes, while the locals unwisely shoot their mouths off in response to the inquiries or provocations of these personae.
The modus operandi of this kind of extreme comedy is the way the fictional character interacts with (largely) unwitting real people, who conveniently make fools of themselves. A prime example would be the scene in Borat in which the itinerant Kazakh got from a group of young Americans the foulest comments on his alleged love interest, Pamela Anderson. Baron Cohen pioneered this technique, which is often as excruciating as it is hilarious, with his creation Ali G. He extended it brilliantly and profitably with Borat, and Brüno takes the same road to notoriety.
And yet, surely, the very persona of Brüno makes it harder to get this right. The galumphing idiot that Borat self-evidently represents is likely to seduce his interlocutors into complacency, whereas Brüno is so garishly flamboyant you can see him coming for miles. There’s a greater chance that the targets of his provocations will be alerted, early on, that something is amiss. Not that everyone who gets taken in by Brüno in the film does see him coming, as it were.
As a character, Brüno is a parody of a stereotype of an imaginary cliché. He’s a lisping, mincing poof who wears the most ridiculous outfits in the name of “fashion”. If there are any such queers out there nowadays, they are already engaged in the business of self-parody — or rather, a parody of a bizarre notion of what it means to be (or to look) queer, a send-up of some game of expected appearances. In this respect, Brüno could be as likely to offend ordinary gay people as he is to offend straights whose homophobia is premised on such clichés.
In Borat a continuous thread was the character’s over-the-top anti-Semitism, which worked in the film to expose and send up the bigotry of others. In Brüno, the character’s “gayness” works to expose and send up others’ homophobia — or so the script should run. But, to get that to happen, Brüno has to represent a particularly visible kind of “gayness”, which takes us back to the question: Are we laughing at the stereotype, or are we laughing at the homophobia? Maybe, as a Jew, Baron Cohen has a feel for anti-Semitism in a way he doesn’t, as a straight man, have a feel for homophobia.
When we get a sequence, early on in the film, of Brüno and his lover’s sexual activities, the images are so preposterous that one has to laugh. It’s the same for a later sex-related passage — an attempt, I think, to replicate the uproarious naked scene in Borat. Yet you have to wonder if there are people out there, among Baron Cohen’s vast audience (more than 18-million tickets for Borat sold in the US alone), who might imagine these are standard gay sexual practices. Does that reveal some anxiety on the part of this gay viewer? Perhaps so. In any case, I think it’s more troubling to most homophobes that the bulk of gay people look just like them, rather than being visual gags who can be spotted at 40 paces.
The most successful episodes in Brüno, to my mind, are those in which Baron Cohen genuinely puts himself in the firing line. The press release is full of the filmmakers’ derring-do — their gatecrashing a fashion show after all the security personnel in Milan had already been put on alert; their life-threatening stand-off with a trio of backwoods hunters, and so on. Brüno meets a real leader of the Palestinian al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade; he gets pursued by angry Hasidim in Israel. But little of what we see in the film has that whiff of real danger — the interviews, for instance, are most reminiscent of Baron Cohen’s Ali G manner, which I find less amusing than Borat’s out-in-the-real-world style.
Brüno and his adoptive black child are guests on a Deep South TV talk show about single parenthood, and the largely black audience gets very heated up — understandably, given that Brüno’s appearance (in both senses) is so obviously calculated to provoke. The scene has that edginess, though, that makes Baron Cohen’s humour work best. The climactic sequence, featuring cage-fighting in Fort Smith, Arkansas, before a truly outraged and violent audience, is both hilarious and very scary. It’s interesting to know that the first version of that scene, shot in Texarkana, Arkansas, had to be abandoned because it couldn’t play out fully, so violent was the reaction.
And there’s a key to Brüno: the careful contrivance that goes into such an episode, the lengths to which the filmmakers have to go to provoke real, spontaneous reactions.
Yes, there is genuine homophobia in the world — young white gay men still get killed in the Land of the Free, whereas black lesbians, particularly, are targets for rape and murder in democratic South Africa.
That is worth remembering. But whether Brüno’s antics do anything more than crack a joke about others’ prejudices, I’m not certain. Some of the time, just watching and hearing the imaginary stereotype that is Brüno, I began to feel a little homophobic myself.
Also read Funkyzeit mit Brüno