Alas to relate, “Bruno,” directed by Larry Charles, written by Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer, and Jeff Schaffer, is evidence of a franchised (and brilliant) indie creation gone regrettably mainstream. In this it’s second iteration, it lost a lot in the translation.
By the time it opened a few days ago, you had heard of Sacha Baron Cohen’s recent escapades at the Milan Fashion Show. “Yup,” I thought, he’s at it again.” Unless you live in North Korea or else have dial-up, you had heard of his giving a new meaning to the term to “face plant” at the MTV awards. You had seen a great many scenes in trailers, either in theatres or on the Internet. And you would have heard of his last-second removal of footage that referenced Janet Jackson’s bro.
And so, unlike “Borat,” which dropped Dada-like and announced into our generic, blasé, corporate-cultural consciousnesses and created, sui generis, something wondrous, edgy, and complacency-busting (or, if you’re either a U.S. Senator or a law-abiding Christian, vulgar, blasphemous, and iconoclastic), you’ve got something you may have anticipated (like me and Daniel Craig’s next Bond) but which nonetheless couldn’t fulfill your expectations.
Why?
Because they were so damn high to start with. Then they got so overexposed that watching the film itself was like watching the special features of an editor’s-cut DVD.
It would have been the same if “Bruno” had appeared first. We would have been flabbergasted and cajoled, reduced to ga-ga whimpering spasms of non-stop laughter.
The character, a swishy fashionista, Austrian (yes, there’s a Hitler joke) to boot, is so over-the-top, beyond caricature, you could just stare at him for hours of freeze-frame amazement.
So is his mission to embrace celebrity-hood in Europe by simply being, and not going to the bother of, oh, dreaming, aspiring, struggling, climbing, consolidating, reinventing, and reveling in his success.
So is his decision to forsake the veil of fashionista-isting (yeah, well, how was he to know that his Velcro suit would act like flypaper?) and moving to Hollywood and embarking on the life of a bit part boulevardier, full time poseur, neon-framed like in a Hollywood Squares game show.
So are his various ambushes that revealed the general cluelessness of hapless souls. Paula Abdul was a particularly apt choice; think what he could have done with Paris Hilton. Not to mention: the two ditzy-beyond-belief-ditzy public relations consultants, his foray in the military (so much for not asking and not telling), self-defense school (“From what direction do homosexuals normally attack?” “From the rear, I reckon.”), swinging (not from trees but probably from chandeliers), male bonding camping, facing indignant talk show audience just because he named his bartered African American son after a former Heisman Trophy winner, trying to find the sort of cause (Middle East peace, for instance) that celebrities would endorse, Ron Paul (please tell me he was in on the joke!!!), and two different churchmen who specialized in exorcising the gay gene.
And yet, as insanely funny as these incidents were, they don’t have much of a shelf life both because we expected them and because the assumptions behind the story line didn’t hold together.
You get the feeling that you’ve been there before. As funny as everything was in the movie, there were parallels between “Borat” and “Bruno.” The voyage to America was shown in the same, in-transit cartoon fashion over a map. His man-fall-out with his dogsbody Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) where he’s left faux-destitute (in the first movie, love-, money-, passport- and ticket-less, we actually felt sorry for him; here, it was more like a deux ex machina to lower the laughter decibel scale. The same high/low guerilla assault on Congressmen and plain-folk.
They’re funny enough. God knows the audience was ricocheting around their seats. But what derailed, yes, derailed the film, was the movie’s structure. In “Borat” the character had an assignment: in masquerading as a foreign journalist, he gained entree into Middle America and the two coasts that framed it. The assignment had a time frame (the ticket, the production deadline) and the comedy developed along the way. His excursions across the country gave him the opportunity to slum on the De Toqueville theme. This 19th century Frenchman was able to explain to us this fledgling experiment called America with keen insight for the simple reason that he was an outsider.
In “Bruno,” though, his themes were more nebulous. Instead of poking wicked fun at the American way of life within the identity of an ingénue journalist, he tries, without anything but incidental (incident heaped on incident) success, to first Borat-ize the world of fashion, and second to expose the sham of celebrity. Both are ripe and rife for satirizing but not in the same movie, please. What made “Borat” so funny was that here was a bumptious guy, coming to the great wonder, so he actually believed, that is America for what amounts to an act of homage and inadvertently calling us for what we really are: hardly the role model of the world.
In the final analysis, “Bruno” suffers for the simple reason that it was preceded by “Borat.” While we may know what to expect, namely, something off-the-wall and unique, a wonderful condom-buster to the prophylactic of movies in particular and culture in general, it’s just that, while the spectacle works (oh boy, does it ever work: just watch the first few minutes and him alone with his first boyfriend) as much as the first film, the idea behind the spectacle was tarnished by repetition and overexposure, but the same meta-processes that, hopefully, this film, like its predecessor, should have mocked.
Comments