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BRÜNO Send This Review to a Friend
If you enjoyed “Borat” you should have a great time laughing at Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film “Brüno,” a fresh journey into the outrageous. Of course, with his brand of humor, you have to be on the same wavelength and you can’t be the sort who easily cringes when Cohen treads into the realm of ethnicity, homosexuality, sexual specifies, gross sex toys, a penis staring at you and any number of assaults on various targets. Some moments verge on the gloriously obscene. I laughed so hard in places that I would like to see the film again. Yes, some of it sags a bit, but that’s typical of most comedy, and there is the good judgment of making this one run just under an hour and a half.
The gimmick here is that Brüno, who describes himself as the second most famous Austrian (remember Hitler?) embarks upon an international journey to seek fame and fortune. No matter how hard he tries, success eludes him throughout a series of comical encounters, with Gustaf Hammarsten as his companion Lutz often adding to the amusement. Brüno is so screamingly gay that when he confesses to someone that he is gay the confession itself is a joke. Elevating the film to more than just a barrel of laughs are the targets he chooses.
Cohen takes aim at reality TV shows by interviewing parents who would agree to their kids doing anything just to get on TV, even being fastened to a cross. He makes fun of those who go to Africa to adopt children by bringing back a little black boy and appearing on a TV show before an appalled black audience. But, he assures, he has given the boy an African-American name—OJ.
He uses Mexican employees to crouch like tables on which one can sit. He uses as foils a karate instructor asked how he could repel an attack by a homosexual, someone who counsels gays on how to become heterosexual and even politician Ron Paul, who is unwittingly put in the position of having to fight off gay advances. Brüno gets involved in a group sex club and finds more than he bargained for, and he stages an arena fighting match that he turns into a horror for an audience of outraged homophobes.
He wreaks havoc by trying to set fashion with a suit made of Velcro. You can imagine the possibilities. Always dressed outlandishly, Brüno carries out a constant attack on taste, underlined by the exaggerated Austrian accent he adopts. Cohen, who in person is quite a handsome looking guy, becomes comically outlandish to look at on screen. He is an extremely gifted comedian as well as a sharp satirist of the societal elements he lampoons.
There is much shared behind-the-scenes creativity, with Larry Charles directing and the screenplay co-written by Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer and Jeff Schaffer, based on a story by Cohen, Peter Baynham, Hines and Mazer and characters created by Cohen. A Universal Pictures release.
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