Bruno
Directed by Larry Charles. Written by Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer, and Jeff Schaffer. With Sacha Baron Cohen, Gustaf Hammarsten, Clifford Banagale, Bono, Elton John, Slash, Snoop Dogg, Sting, Paula Abdul, and Harrison Ford. (R)
There's really no denying that Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian, actor, and satirist behind Bruno (and his 2006 predecessor, Borat Sagdiyev), is a talented performer. At times, his devotion to his characters calls to mind an older style of comedy, one that relied more on scenario and situation than an endless barrage of one-liners. It's an approach that worked to great if often offensive effect in Borat, where the fictitious Kazakh television personality made such a splash that the real government of his supposed homeland disowned him in an advertising campaign in the New York Times.
Luckily for Austria—and unfortunately for the rest of us—Bruno is no Borat. The flamboyant host of the thumping-bass fashion show Funkyzeit, Bruno loses his red-carpet credentials after a disastrous altercation at a runway show. Shunned in his native land ("For the second time in a century, the world has turned on Austria's greatest man," says Bruno ), he decides to relocate to America, where he sees celebrity as his birthright. His quest to attain a tabloid-worthy infamy makes up the rest of the film, which at 82 minutes (many featuring genitalia!) still feels like an eternity.
Cohen chooses some ripe targets for some of his barbs: early on, he decides to get Bruno involved in the celebrity charity game, and sets up an interview with a pair of brainless "charity consultants" who talk airily about "hot" charities. "Darfur's big now," agrees Bruno, "but what's Dar-Five?"
In one of the film's few really scathing segments, he interviews a string of mothers eager to have their infant co-star in a photo shoot with Bruno's newly adopted African child; to land the role, they variously agree to let their children handle toxic chemicals, undergo liposuction, and appear in an infant-sized Nazi uniform, pushing a wheelbarrow holding another baby in Jewish garb. (The final shoot features three babies on crosses, with Bruno's kid—he's named him O.J., of course—playing Jesus.)
It's just that kind of social criticism that's missing from the rest of the film. In its place are cheap idiocies that wilt on the vine: Br?no tries to bring peace to Israel but confuses Hamas with hummus; Bruno takes a martial arts course and attacks his instructor with rubber sex toys. After wangling an invitation to join a hunting party, he shows up naked at another man's tent at three in the morning. Bruno is supposed to be very, very gay, and we're supposed to laugh at the hunters' unease in his presence; unexpectedly—and it seems that Cohen was caught off guard, too—they turn out, like so many others in the film, to be basically decent people who don't rise to easy bait. To draw them out, Cohen is forced to ever more outrageous levels of stereotype, until he seems nothing more than desperate, a kid on the playground running around with his pants down.
Bruno's rather galling conclusion hints that perhaps Cohen has achieved a level of fame that precludes his particular kind of sneak-attack moviemaking, and a segment removed from the final film seems to confirm it. Featuring an interview with La Toya Jackson, it was cut from prints following the news of her famous brother's death; just a few years ago, one feels, Cohen would have relished the coincidence.
*
Also this week: After a round of delays, the Academy Award-winning Japanese film Departures has opened at Amherst Cinema. It stars baby-faced actor Masahiro Motoki as Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist in Tokyo who loses his orchestra job early in the film. Unable to pay the bills, he decides to return, with his wife, to his boyhood home in the small town of Yamagata.
Living in a house left to him by his deceased mother, the pair start over. During his job hunt, Daigo finds a position in what he wrongly assumes to be a travel agency; in truth, it is a busy practice dealing with funeral preparations–the departures of the title. His penury forces him to overcome his initial revulsion—his first job involves preparing the body of a woman who died two weeks before being discovered—but as he continues to learn the ropes from his gentle and elderly boss, he finds to his great surprise that he is not only skilled at the work, but that he enjoys it. His pre-funeral attentions to the dead—the application of makeup and dressing of the corpse—essentially bring them back to life for a moment, long enough for their families to make their peace with their passing.
Unfortunately for Daigo, old prejudices prove strong. When she discovers what he does for a living, his wife flees back to Tokyo, and old friends refuse to be seen in his company. Alone, he finds himself ruminating on the hated memory of his father, who abandoned the family when Daigo was a child. Death, desertions and disillusionment—it all sounds like a depressing affair. Yet the magic of Departures is that it is a film filled, like a New Orleans funeral procession, with the bright light of life.
At Northampton's Media Education Foundation, the documentary Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas is presented in a free screening at 7 p.m. Friday night. Directed by Michael Fox and Silvia Leindecker, the filmmakers' stated goal in making the movie is to ask a deceptively simple question: "What is democracy?"
To plumb the depths of the answers—like those who claim to support it, democracy assumes many forms—they interview elected representatives, academics, activists, community members and cooperative workers. The story of democracy, it turns out, is a kaleidoscope of ideas, some more accepted than others depending on where it takes hold. And while we in the United States might assume our own brand of democracy is the norm, other countries in the Americas, following decades of dictatorship and civil war, are taking democracy to a much more local level.
To tell those stories, Fox and Leindecker visit Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and beyond, and largely allow their subjects' own words to tell the tale—in a two-hour documentary, there are only a few minutes of narration. In the process of creating communal councils and assemblies that allow for a much more direct participation in the democratic process, these people, once oppressed, strive to wrest power from the grip of a distant elite, and remind us that the jewel of democracy is a gem of many facets.
