Brüno is a comedy built on one question: how far can a character push a room full of people before they stop laughing and start screaming. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Brüno Gehard, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter who travels to Los Angeles hoping to launch a celebrity interview show. What follows is a series of interviews, public displays and set pieces designed to test the limits of decency, and not all of them land.
The film is a mockumentary, and it treats Brüno’s journey as a sincere quest for fame. He is fired from his show, Funkyzeit mit Brüno, after disrupting a Milan Fashion Week catwalk, and his lover Diesel leaves him for another man. With his assistant’s assistant, Lutz Schulz, he heads to the United States, where he tries an acting career as an extra on Medium, interviews Paula Abdul, and produces a pilot episode that includes a naked Mexican man serving sushi on his body. None of it goes well.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Interviews That Land
The film’s best moments come from its interviews. Brüno’s interactions with Paula Abdul, Brittny Gastineau, Harrison Ford, Ron Paul, Yossi Alpher and Ghassan Khatib are the reason anyone watches. They are staged encounters, but they play as genuine confrontations. Abdul’s discomfort when Brüno serves her sushi on a naked man is a highlight. Ford’s “Fuck Off” response to Brüno’s persistent questioning is another. The scenes with Ron Paul, where Brüno claims to have mistaken him for RuPaul and drops his pants during a dance, land less cleanly, but still pack a punch.
Set Pieces That Miss
The film’s weakest moments are its set pieces. A sequence where Brüno consults a spiritualist to contact his dead lover Rob Pilatus involves miming sex acts on an invisible ghost. Another has him consult charity consultants to pick a world problem for maximum fame, settling on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The result is a trip to Jerusalem that mostly plays as satire aimed at the audience rather than at the people on screen. These stretches feel like filler, and they slow the film’s momentum.
The film’s technical approach is consistent throughout. It is shot like a documentary, with handheld cameras and talking-head interviews. The editing is brisk, and the film rarely lets a joke sit too long. But the tone shifts frequently, moving from broad physical comedy to dark satire to outright shock value within a single scene. That inconsistency is the film’s biggest problem.
Cameos Worth Watching
The supporting cast is a mix of professional actors and cameos. Gustaf Hammarsten plays Lutz, and Clifford Bañagale plays Diesel. Josh Meyers appears as Kookus, and Marco Xavier plays one of the Mexican gardeners. Bono, Chris Martin, Elton John, Harrison Ford and Ron Paul appear as themselves. The cameos are the film’s strongest asset, and they give the movie a sense of scale that its jokes sometimes lack.
The film is a product of its time. It was released in 2009, and its targets include reality television, political correctness and the celebrity culture it satirizes. Some of those targets have aged poorly. The film’s treatment of sexuality, race and disability remains uncomfortable viewing, and its humor depends heavily on the audience’s willingness to accept its premises without complaint.
Hard Numbers
- Director: Larry Charles
- Writer: Dan Mazer, Anthony Hines, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeff Schaffer, Peter Baynham
- Release date: July 10, 2009 (United States and United Kingdom)
- Runtime: 83 minutes
- Budget: $42 million
- Box office: $139 million worldwide
Brüno is a flawed but occasionally brilliant comedy. Its best sequences are sharp, pointed and genuinely funny. Its worst are crude, offensive and poorly paced. The film’s ambitions are larger than its execution, and that gap shows. It is a film worth seeing once, for the moments that work, but not a film that rewards repeated viewings.
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