The difference between comedic anarchist Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat and Bruno characters is that Borat was pointed social satire and Bruno is broad parody. Borat was a brilliant invention in order to throw people’s social fears and prejudices back into their faces. The Borat film crossed lines and pushed buttons; it had a clear target and aimed right for the heart; it made the audience laugh at the ignorance of this primitive foreign man when set loose on a developed country like America and then pulled a fast one by revealing that the primates are really us. Even better was that, at the time, there was nothing else quite like it out there.
Bruno on the other hand has no clear target. It’s the product of a comedian going through the same routine while trying desperately to top himself by pushing unexplored boundaries in bad taste and losing aim in the process. If Borat was a direct attack, Bruno is a blind crapshoot with barreled fish for targets.
Gay Austrian Fashionista
As a gay Austrian fashionista, Bruno spends remarkably little time attacking the true enemy: the superfluous and superficial fashion world. After being banned from every runway and being fired from his hot fashion show after a funny incident involving a prototypical suite composed entirely of Velcro during Fashion Week, Bruno decides to head to America to find new fame and glory.
After being thrown off set as an overacting extra on a hit TV show, Bruno tries his hand at celebrity interviewing only to be walked out on by Paula Abdul who, trying her best to be polite, doesn’t take to kindly to taking about humanitarian work while sitting atop furniture made from the Mexican immigrant yard workers.
Next up is to make a sex tape, but Bruno’s choice in Republican Rep. Ron Paul as his celebrity sex partner maybe isn’t the wisest.
Having also failed to get a celebrity gossip-like show on network television, Bruno heads to the Middle East in order to mediate peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis, and although the film gets a big laugh from Bruno, wearing a costume that could be from a gay Jew porn, getting chased through the streets by Hasidic Jews, his confusion between Islamic terrorist movement Hamas and the Middle Eastern delicacy Hummus during the peace talks is scarping desperately close to the bottom of the comedic barrel. And once again the comedic Achilles' heel is revealed: where Borat was a likeable but uncultured foreigner in a new world, Bruno boarders more often than not on simply being nearly retarded.
THe Problem with Bruno
And therein is Bruno’s main problem. At home in the fashion world Bruno functions as pointed satire, showing A) not only the superficial nature of the artificial worlds its inhabitants exist in but B) to show that they are so detached from reality that they don’t even recognize the fools they are being made out to be.
However, when the film, which is, like Borat, in the style of an improvised documentary inflicted on unsuspecting bystanders, takes Bruno out into the world for the same rise and fall anti-American narrative, Bruno becomes no more than a collection of episodes in which Cohen can only attempt to be more politically incorrect than in the last one.
Saying Something About Homosexuality
The film does try to say something about American’s fear of homosexuality, but the targets are cheap shots that constantly, in real life, do a fine job of mocking themselves out of their own gravity without the need for Bruno along for the ride.
If Cohen wanted to say something significant about homosexuality than he’s come far too late into the (homo)sexual revolution for a scene like the climax at a southern ultimate fighting match to be either shocking, funny, or socially relevant. In 1972’s Pink Flamingos when John Waters made an unknown man into a cult star for a talent simply described as a “singing” anus, new ground was being broken whether one wanted it to be or not. In 2009, Bruno is playing in the kiddy pool.
Verdict
So there are two questions to ask about Bruno in weighing whether or not it is a good film. The first is: is it funny? The answer is yes, it has several moments of inspired hilarity (although admittedly less than Borat). The Hottest Baby Competition sees Cohen aiming right for a direct target and walking away with a sequence of absolute genius and an opening scene shows a Stairmaster used in ways that are imaginative to say the least.
But then one must ask if Bruno’s comedy is working towards unearthing a clear and precise hypothesis? And, scene after scene, it reveals that it is not, and the film’s comedic blades are dulled substantially by the sinking realization that Cohen has no outside motivation for his hijinks other than broad parody. What he’s parodying or why, he doesn’t quite seem to know.
