MasterChugs Theater: ‘Bruno’

You will never view pygmy sex the same way ever again.

Like many other dangerous and controversial comedians, the role-playing guerrilla satirist Sacha Baron Cohen knows how to draw an audience into a conspiratorial relationship with him — and then make you squirm anyway. Bruno, his newest quasi-documentary stunt comedy, is, if anything, a crazier, funnier, and even pricklier pincushion of a movie than Borat, his 2006 tweak of all things dumb, bigoted, and American. Teaming up again with director Larry Charles, Baron Cohen once more wanders the U.S. landscape in the put-on guise of an egomaniacally doltish yet weirdly resonant pest. This time he’s Bruno, a cretinous and very, very gay Austrian fashion-celebrity-fame whore in skintight hot pants and a frosted mop of Eurotrash hair that spills over his forehead like the tail of a dead squirrel.

Bruno craves fame. He wants to be “the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler.” But when his TV show is canceled after a backstage fashion show debacle (a worthy target), he loses his lover, Diesel, and his direction. How can he become famous now?

Maybe by making peace in the Middle East  traipsing around Jerusalem in Hasidic short shorts (Hasidic Jews chase him). Perhaps an “accessory” African baby adoption is the answer. Watch passengers’ jaws drop when the infant is collected from a box in the airport luggage carousel.

Or maybe, if he wants to become “the biggest gay movie star since Schwarzenegger,” he needs to emulate such stars as ” Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kevin Spacey.” The secret is being straight. Can Bruno “change?” Naturally, he goes to Alabama for church counseling, infiltrates a National Guard base for Officer’s Candidate School and heads out hunting with “the boys” for a few butch lessons. And no, you don’t want to know what a “swinger’s club” in rural Alabama looks like. But Bruno does. As does Rick Snee.

Where a great piece of fiction can refract the human condition through a created character, a model in which we will recognize elements of ourselves, Bruno instead seeks to catalyze real human actions by imposing a character as a stimulus to real individuals, and capturing an image of humanity in their resulting behavior. Through their encounters with the caricature, the ‘real people’ in Bruno are lead to reveal something of themselves, and through the film’s varied selection of situations and people shown, and range of themes explored and provocations made, a fascinating tapestry of hypocrisy, stupidity and bigotry has been woven.

And I will argue with any claims that the movie’s subjects are being tricked into their shameless displays. Sure, a puddle of gas won’t burn if you don’t drop a match in it, but you can’t blame the match for the oil being flammable in the first place. Defending these folk is, at the very least, condoning their volatility.

As a narrative, Bruno isn’t flawless. Indeed, the film only seems to put its teeth in after a few minutes, and takes them out a few minutes before the end. But these bookends of blah only dull the blade a little, and the main thrust cuts deep.

The entire film is in seriously questionable taste, and there will, of course, be debates about what’s staged and what’s not. Those looking for purity in satire should stay away. Yet there’s a vision at work in Bruno — the movie is a toxic dart aimed at the spangly new heart of American hypocrisy: our fake-tolerant, fake-charitable, fake-liberated-yet-still madly-closeted fame culture. Bruno ends on a note of scandalously funny out-and-proud triumph, and that’s because Sacha Baron Cohen never makes a plea for tolerance. He tosses a grenade for tolerance.