So as we all know, Sacha Baron Cohen has created another documentary style film that follows the journey of another one of his brilliant characters, Bruno. With the amount of hype surrounding this film you must have been hiding under a rock for the last few weeks if you haven’t heard of it or don’t know at least a little bit about it.
At the beginning of the film Bruno is a host of an Austrian fashion TV show which he subsequently gets fired from and embarks on a journey to Hollywood to try to become a celebrity.
We soon learn (although you could have guessed from just seeing the trailers) that Bruno is homosexual and very sexually active. The whole film revolves around not only pushing the limits of what is acceptable on a cinema screen, but also highlighting ignorance and intollerance in people.
Although on the surface it may appear that the film consists of nothing more than gay jokes and contraversy, it all has a point, (well, I say that, MOST of it has a point, but there are some bits that seem to be in there for no other reason than the novelty of having a penis flapping around on screen, but that was entertaining enough through shock-value alone) and the point of it is to point out the traditionalist, narrow minded ignorance that people STILL have despite the times we live in. One of the best examples of this is when he decides that in order to be a big Hollywood star, he needs to be straight like all the others (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt etc.) and so he goes to a christian priest in an attempt to get himself converted from homosexuality. This scene is one of my favourites as it just points out the stubbornness of christianity (and most religions really) and its refusal to believe anything other than what their prehistoric teachings say, despite the fact that it has been proven that homosexuality is not a choice, but a biological/genetic thing and despite the fact that Bruno is SO clearly gay and nothing else, (he even says that the idea of making love to women repulses him) the preist carrys on telling him that he must effectively, bottle it all up, push it to the back of his mind and BE straight, which anyone can tell is a one way ticket to depression and then possibly some kind of brain tumour for someone that knows they’re gay.
Another great scene in the film, and probably my personal highlight of the whole feature is when Bruno discovers that when people get kidnapped, videos of them get displayed around the world and so that can be a way for him to become famous, so he then travels to the Middle East in order to try and get kidnapped.
He interviews one a member of a suspected terrorist organisation with a translator, and I absolutely love this scene because you can tell that it is completely real and unstaged and he is basically asking this terrorist to kidnap him. Brilliant. The man does not look impressed with the questions he is being asked and you wonder how far he will push him, and then he says something like this; “You should really consider shaving off your beards because your King Osama looks like a sort of, dirty wizard or a homeless santa” at this point the translator pauses before telling the interveiwee what Bruno has said, but then he demands to know exactly what was just said, and so that translator tells him. He then goes very stern faced and says something in his own language which the translator doesn’t translate, he simply says “Leave now, seriously get out of here now” and you then see Bruno being escorted through the town centre with a veil over his head saying “I have been advised to leave the Middle East” Ha! I bet he was advised to leave the Middle East because I reckon he would have been shot if he’d stayed there much longer!
So to summarise, I rated Bruno very highly. Even though it’s an unconventional comedy in the way that (aside from the obvious) you may not be physically laughing the whole way through, but my god you will be entertained.
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