“We think you’re the most special people in the entire world…so don’t even think about taking out your cellphone, because I’ve been working out, and I will fucking rack your brains into the back of your head. I’m gonna anally rape you. I’m not even joking.”
That was the inimitable Tim League, founder of the beery palace of world cinema nerdery in central Texas, the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, introducing the SXSW/Fantastic Fest presentation of three segments from Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming follow-up to his surprisingly beloved Borat. It was an apt threat to procede a glimpse of a film that critiques the very American habits of posturing, stereotyping, and irrationally vilifying, but only via engaging in them. That’s Cohen’s schtick, of course: he sells ugly Americans their ugliness back to them, provoking shame and anger from his unsuspecting subjects and, from well-educated audiences of better-thans, horror that easily, almost unthinkingly, manifests itself in laughs.
But the 20-something minutes we were shown of the film (which is currently listed on IMDB without a credited director) indicate that Cohen has hardly been up to business as usual since Borat. That film, in turning its namesake Kazakhstanian “reporter” into a household name, made enough of Cohen’s potential marks wise enough to the star/social satirist’s working methods (and his litany of faux-foreign naifs that front them) to spark debate throughout the production as to how Cohen would, er, keep it real. The footage we saw suggests that “realness” wasn’t necessarily as strict a part of the agenda this time around.
We viewed three scenes, all preceded by a taped introduction starring Cohen as some version of himself, sitting at an editing bay and playing up his Britishness: a photoshoot casting session where Bruno interviews the parents of baby actors, all of whom seem willing to agree to subject their children to anything (up to and including dead or dying animals, condemned structures and amateur science) if it’ll get their kid a job; a segment of a talk show hosted by Richard Bey, in which Bruno trots out his adopted black baby (who wears a half-shirt with the label, ’Gayby”) and declares his intention to find a husband; and an episode of an ultimate fighting show hosted by Bruno in disguise as his allegedly hetero alter ego Straight Dave, which devolves into a beer-throwing riot when a fight awaken’s Bruno/Dave’s latent homoerotics.
Of these scenes, only the casting session felt like familiar, Borat-esque, “we’re making a documentary wink wink” shenanigans. The others seemed to employ a mix of scripting, staging and serendipity to approximate the earlier film’s total anarchy. My instinct watching the talk show scene was that it was entirely scripted; my research indicates that cut rate Jerry Springer clone Richard Bey hasn’t had a TV show since the late 90s. The ultimate fighting scene seemed similarly contrived, the hysteric encounter between the too-gay-to-be-contained Bruno and a crew of good ol’ homophobes similarly lifeless. This stuff definitely delivers laughs, but in their current incarnation the segments lack that spark that made Borat so exciting, that element of danger.
We were warned that two of the segments, the casting and the Richard Bey show, were being shown in a much longer form than would appear in the film. While it’s not completely clear is how it all fits together narratively, there does seem to be a theme to the settings, one which ties into the necessarily evolution of Cohen’s methods. From casting to trashy talk shows to filmed athletainment, Bruno is traveling through situations that have a certain artificiality built-in. Stage parents are desperate to sell their children into a fantasy; the Richard Beys of the world preceded reality TV producers in manipulating pathetic lives until they looked like entertainment; wrestling and its variants always include an element of theater. If Cohen had to amp up the element of staging in order to get his job done in a post-Borat world, it’s interesting that he seems to be doing it within realms that rely on the construction of reality. What remains to be seen is whether or not that construction will make for the unrestrained comedy that we’ve come to expect from him.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth