Because of the heat, yesterday afternoon the Vista was packed. As we bought our tickets, there was a woman standing beside the line shouting, “Save your money! This movie is nothing but pornography! It shows men’s private parts! I brought my daughter and had no idea what filth it was.” She sounded earnest, but I wondered if it wasn’t a prank—the kind of prank that the whole movie allegedly is composed of.
Brüno is an event-movie, not a story-movie or an art-movie. The point of it is to tell a story or to evoke a mood, but to provide a roller-coaster to ride together with friends. It is an effective roller-coaster, and after it was over we stumbled out stunned and drained.
It is very funny—there are moments of delirium—but it is essentially a horror movie.
I know it was a horror movie because I sat through a good deal of it with my eyes shut. The horror comes from the image of America that is presented. E.g. the episode where Brüno quizzes parents who are trying to get their infants hired as models about whether or not it would be OK to expose their kid to wasps and bees, outdated heavy machinery, dead animals, burning phosphorus, crucifixions, …. And would they mind having their children dressed in a Nazi uniform, posing with a wheelbarrow in which another child will be posing as a dead Jew? Of course none of them mind.
It is very loud and blunt but it is not crude. Mr. Cohen has a good comedian’s ear for subtly weird details. Everyone will have their own example, but I continue to be disturbed by the way Brüno, in his fake-German, repeatedly referred to his anus as “mein Auschwitz.” I leave it to somebody else to unpack the scatological blasphemy, with all the implied references to Swift, Freud, Adorno, Norman O. Brown, Leo Bersani and company.
Is
the movie made entirely of documentation of pranks? I doubt it, but it doesn’t
matter. Whether actors or authentic specimens, the monsters Brüno parades are
all too true.
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