(Spoiler alert)
EVER since Ali G first donned his bling, there’s been a strain of look-at-me, need-to-please populism in Sacha Baron Cohen’s work that has threatened to undermine the political charge that makes his best situationist pranks so painful, so powerful, and so funny. In Bruno, far more than in its brilliant predecessor, there are just too many contrived and ill-judged stunts that reveal little other than Baron Cohen’s desperate need to shock and his reliance on the often unforthcoming responses of others to make his comedy work.
Some of these encounters feel like no more than cheap ill-spirited assaults on the dignity of the person concerned - whose function is simply to facilitate or passively witness the gag. Bruno reaches its nadir early on with a scene in which Baron Cohen mimes fellating the ghost of a deceased member of Milli Vanilli in front of a merely nonplussed, seen-it-all Hollywood psychic. Scenes like this hold no political or social resonance and pay little comedic dividend; nor are they transgressive – especially when the ‘target’ is being paid to be there in the first place.
But at his most inspired, Baron Cohen’s ability to unleash volcanic social forces and make them play out on the screen can still be breathtaking. The dénouement of Bruno is one such moment – and it’s a stroke of genius that redeems and validates all that has gone before it.
Bruno is a 19-year-old Austrian fashionista who decamps (sic) to America in a desperate quest to attain fame at all costs. Acting on the theory that only straight guys win in Hollywood (such as his heroes Tom Cruise and Kevin Spacey), Bruno launches a new cable show hosted by his heterosexual alter-ego, Straight Dave.
According to reports in the Post Chronicle, a local advertising campaign in Fort Smith, Arkansas for “Straight Dave’s Man Slammin’ Max Out” promised a night of hardcore mixed martial arts cage fighting and one dollar beers. Result: a crowd of evolutionary-throwback rednecks and their white trash WAGS show up and are duly whipped into a gay-baiting blood-frenzy by Bruno who, as Straight Dave, has reinvented himelf via a handlebar moustache and flannel shirt.
But when his masculinity is challenged by his former assistant and besotted ex-lover Lutz, Straight Dave invites him into the cage for a face off – only to snog his face off. The two men’s emotional reunion rapidly decends into an orgy of pants-down heavy petting, slo-mo soundtracked by Maria Carey.
The gobsmakcked onlookers roar with hatred; their faces register actual physical pain; one man actually cries, such is his sense of crisis and betrayal. We hear blood-curdling howls of frustration, and as mono-browed Neanderthals hurl seats at the ring, we’re left in no doubt that were it not for the cage, they would be tearing the two men to pieces.
It’s a riveting spectacle: as the cameras are trained on their faces, it’s clear the show’s audience have themselves become the show. We are safe on our side of the cinema screen, just as Baron Cohen is in his cage, and from our reverse viewpoint through the bars, the crowd both look and behave like caged animals. The inescapable message: this is the face of homophobia, and boy is it ugly. In both concept and execution it’s a brave and brilliant achievement.
