Sacha Baron Cohen’s second ambush comedy is louder, filthier and shorter than Borat, and roughly half as funny. The real people are still worth watching; the invented ones, Brüno included, wear thin well before the hour is out.
Three years after Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen and the director Larry Charles take the same method, a fictional fool let loose among real Americans, and swap the Kazakh reporter for Brüno: a gay Austrian fashion presenter with a wardrobe of lederhosen and a need to be famous for anything at all. The tagline reads “Borat was so 2006”, which is a bold thing to print when the follow-up is this close a copy. Brüno has perhaps six good scenes in 83 minutes. That is not nothing. It is not enough either.
The method still works when the people across the table do not know what is happening to them. The best run in the film has Brüno, casting a photo shoot, asking parents what their toddlers will put up with. One mother agrees to liposuction. Another is asked about lit phosphorus and says yes after a pause. We were horrified, and we laughed, and we could not pull the two feelings apart; nobody scripted those answers, and the parents give them to a man dressed like a Tyrolean waiter without a flicker of doubt. The same goes for the Ron Paul interview, in which a congressman is lured into a hotel room and bolts when he realises why he is there.
Two cinematographers are credited, Wolfgang Held and Anthony Hardwick, and the film has two looks that never agree. The ambushes are shot the way a hidden camera shoots, from a distance, loosely framed, grey under hotel lighting. The story scenes, the Austrian television studio and the Los Angeles flat Brüno shares with Lutz, are lit and blocked like a studio comedy. Every time the film cuts between them you can see which parts were planned, and the suspicion that some of the ambushes were planned too never leaves. The charity single, for which Bono, Chris Martin and Elton John turn up as themselves, is funny and plainly arranged, and it arrives at about the halfway point.
Four editors are credited, Scott M. Davids, Eric Kissack, James Thomas and Jonathan Corn, and between them they have cut the film to 83 minutes. It still feels long, because the joins are so quick that nothing is allowed to build. Borat’s set pieces had slow fuses. Here the film is already running for the next one before the last has finished. Erran Baron Cohen’s score is Europop laid flat over everything, the right joke once and the same joke the fifteenth time. Jason Alper’s costumes do more work than anyone but the star. The velcro suit that gets Brüno thrown off a Milan runway in the opening minutes is the best visual gag in the film, and nothing later beats it.
The character is the trouble. Borat was an idiot you could pity; he was ignorant and eager, and the joke was on the people who agreed with him. Brüno is vain, cruel and bored by everyone, and when a stranger’s bigotry arrives it plays less as a discovery than as a reply to provocation. More than once we found ourselves on the wrong side, embarrassed for the hunters, the swingers and the pastor who had been handed a scene and were being punished for taking part. Gustaf Hammarsten’s Lutz, who adores Brüno and is treated like luggage, is the one person on screen with any warmth, and the film mislays him for whole stretches.
There is a late set piece in a cage in front of several thousand people that we will not describe. We can say that the crowd’s reaction is the one piece of evidence in the film nobody could have staged, and that for about a minute we stopped laughing and sat still. It is also the point where the film is most obviously in charge of what happens, which is a strange place for a hidden-camera comedy to be at its climax.
See it with company, a drink and low expectations, and treat the 18 certificate as a warning rather than a selling point: the sex gags are relentless and several of them would end a first date. If Borat made you laugh you will laugh here perhaps a dozen times. If it did not, nothing in this will change your mind, and Brüno would not notice either way.
