Bruno

BRUNO
Starring Sasha Baron Cohen. Directed by Larry Charles. Produced by Everyman Pictures. 81 minutes

Sasha Baron Cohen is the Ur-comic: equal parts tummler, provocateur and saboteur. Hard to say at this point whether he’s a satiric genius with Swiftian chops or just another wacked out love child of the Monty Python gang. His latest movie, Bruno, seems to fall into another category altogether. It’s more an experience in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word than entertainment. Yes, it’s really funny in places, but mostly not ha-ha funny, and nowhere near the runaway romp of his first flick, the groundbreaking Borat. Still, if you like your humor raw and outrageous, chock full of jokes about penises and the human body’s various fluids, gases and secretions, this movie is for you. Mix one part Austin Powers with two parts Marquis de Sade and a twist of bromance and you’re almost there.

Bruno is the story of a gay, German fashionista in resolute pursuit of celebrity. There’s something prissy even imperious about the eponymous Bruno, a comic exaggeration of the flamboyant narcissism of real fashionistas. It would have been an inspired choice except fashionistas don’t leave much for a comic to send up.

To complicate the comic equation further, Cohen has made Bruno a sadist, one of those archetypal Germanic practitioners of the new cruelty. He’s an S+M artist using other people’s pain as his palette, and he’s just not a likable fellow. Mike Meyers made this kind of character funny on Saturday Night Live but he was extremely careful to be charming and silly when he was being cruel, letting us in on the joke. Adam Sandler is also cruel and self-absorbed in Funny People but his occasional glint of self-awareness keeps us in the game. In Bruno, Cohen has eliminated the Keatonesque innocence he used so effectively in Borat, almost as if he is deliberately raising the comic bar for himself. The film veers pretty close to Andy Kaufman’s wrestling routine at times, that twilight zoned place where comedy becomes performance art and starts prying up the floor boards of our societal and sexual conventions even as we stand on them – and then keeps hitting us over the head with them.

Cohen used exactly the same Candid Camera-style strategy in both of his films. He embodies an extreme comic character and somehow makes him seem like a plausible denizen of a crazy world not quite our own. He then has this character do, say or want something slightly aberrant from real people and films their reactions. The results, as you’d expect, are sometimes embarrassing or ha-ha funny. But Sasha Cohen is not a benign, avuncular student of human nature like Allen Funt. He is a satirist who delights in rubbing our faces in the droppings of our sacred cows. Some of what he does is disturbing.

There’s one scene early in the film where Bruno repeatedly rams some Rube Goldberg contraption on a pulley into his dwarf partner’s butt hole. While certainly surreal enough to be comedy, the scene was more strange and cruel than funny. The really funny part (still not ha-ha) was how directly and frankly this kind of sexual act is presented in the film. It felt like Discovery Channel meets reality TV, nothing hidden or forbidden. Is this perhaps our culture’s final revenge on the Puritans, our inching ever closer to the tribal rites of A Clockwork Orange?

That said, I really liked the scene where Bruno’s penis (aided and abetted by special effects) is yoyo’d around his groin with the easy precision of a circus act and ends by speaking through its urethral opening. I’d never seen a penis do tricks before or heard one talk, although the male organ is well known for having its own mind. Maybe it was quoting Augie March, the Saul Bellow character who said, “I want, I want, I want.” (or was that from the Dangling Man?) The utterly unselfconscious freedom of this scene felt really liberating. I laughed out loud because there’s a tension between the tectonic plates of the body and the mind, and laughter is the earthquake that keeps them from breaking apart entirely.

I had another LOL experience when Bruno, attempting to become a celeb by embracing a high profile charity cause, flies to Israel to make peace in the Middle East. He actually succeeds in getting a Palestinian citizen and an Israeli citizen to hold hands and sing the moral equivalent of kumbayah. The really not funny ha-ha thing about this scene is that Bruno’s preposterous peace mission is about as successful as the efforts of myriad high-ranking officials over the last 60 years.

In the end, Bruno is not a good film, and Sasha Cohen is not trying to teach us to reclaim the power of singing and holding hands that has been lost since the Civil Rights movement went out of business. The man is a comic, not a sage, but he takes no prisoners, and that makes him an interesting guy to watch.