Bruno's Indeterminate Intentions.

ANYONE going to Bruno expecting a camp film about a very gay fashion journalist--oh, would that have been funny (and it is, for about twelve minutes of the movie)--is going to be sorely disappointed by Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film. Generally I hold my hands up before my face at movies when they are so violent I can't bear to watch the blood and gore (the steam bath scene in Eastern Promises, say); this time I held my hands up because the movie was excruciating for other reasons.

Excruciating, appalling, awful: I wasn't sure what word to apply to the movie during and after the screening. I do know that when I left I couldn't even find an expression to put on my face as I passed the people outside in the hall waiting to see other movies. I was, I guess, just embarrassed. The odd thing was that Bruno was being shown on three screens in the mall that I went to in Gainesville, Florida--expectations for a Borat-like hit, I assume--but the theater I entered was empty.

Bruno starts out as a satire of a gay fashionista, and it is very funny. But then Bruno decides to go to Los Angeles and become a celebrity--and from that point on, there are two strands in the movie, the world of Bruno as outrageous queen and the world in which Madonna adopts African children. This excoriating movie, like an Old Testament prophet in its disgust for humanity, takes on: Austria, Los Angeles, the American South, fashion shows, psychics, charity consultants, agents, television executives, African Americans, Arabs, Jews (in one scene Hasidim chase Bruno down the street because he's wearing a gay version of their garb), swingers, hunters, pro wrestling audiences, the military--all of the exemplars of American machismo. But what it doesn't do is orient the viewer, which means we never know what sort of thing we're watching--not a true documentary, to be sure, but then what? A scripted movie spliced with documentary scenes in which we never know what's real and what's staged? It's a confusion that in the end is fatal to the film.

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One wonders if Bruno fell victim to second novel syndrome: Cohen had to follow up a big success, an original movie whose sequel could not be original by definition. Borat was new. Bruno is formulaic, and the formula is not observed very well, with adulterated elements that spoil the concept that made Borat so amazing. Bruno raises the question, when you leave, not of "Is it good for gays?" so much as "What was that?" The Hitler jokes remind me of Mel Brooks--and when I left I felt just like the audience at Springtime for Hitler.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) issued a reprimand of Bruno, citing two scenes in particular (one of Bruno holding his adopted baby in a hot tub with the men around him having sex; another of Bruno getting married). And it's true that Bruno seems raunchier than Borat, perhaps because homosexuality is by definition about sex (the eternal problem with the subject) or merely seems raunchier to some people. But the general worry about Bruno is the same one that makes gay people ask, every Pride Day when images of drag queens and people in leather are broadcast on national TV, "Why can't they show people in business suits and sports clothes?" This issue is perennial: people wondered whether Will & Grace wasn't a gay minstrel show, with Jack such a flaming queen that the most extreme stereotypes of gay men were being reinforced for a straight audience laughing at him. But not to worry: Bruno isn't really about a queen like Jack in Will & Grace, or Albin in the original version of La Cage Aux Folles, the mother of them all; it's about Sacha Baron Cohen, hairless and waxed, with a blond wig, forcing himself into situations in which his incredible chutzpah is the real subject. That's why, as one reviewer said, the movie isn't so much about homophobia as it is about being assaulted by Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen's coruscating disdain for human beings' prejudices, amorality, greed, and vanity--his contempt--is so widespread that he reminds me of another English actor whose dark view of the human race kept showing through in his comedy: Charlie Chaplin, of all people. What's on trial here is the human race. Gay people, despite the movie's premise, are almost incidental to it.

Gay people have no control of their images, anyway, in a culture as wired as ours, however much GLAAD issues its protests. Nothing is going to take away the visceral distaste many straight people have for what homos do with one another. Just go on the Web to a site like silverdaddies.com to see images that not even Bruno can top--old men with their faces stuck up other men's asses. Years ago Christopher Street magazine (which for a few issues decided to be a gay version of The National Lampoon) ran a picture of a man with his face smeared with some brown substance above the title "Gay Men's Bowel Syndrome." Bruno is full of this sort of satire. As Anthony Lane points out in his New Yorker review, Cohen's movie is replete with an Anglo-Freudian obsession with genitals--with assholes and dicks. Cohen does a Puppetry-of-the-Penis number with his own schlong, in fact, and the movie almost begins with a send-up of sodomy involving machines and champagne bottles that is reprised in a later scene of Bruno and his assistant locked together in intercourse in a hotel room with the TV remote control device stuck up Bruno's ass--oddly reminiscent of those early Peter Sellers comedies involving factory conveyor belts. There is clearly something ludicrous about gay sex to Cohen; the most disconcerting scene to me was Bruno miming a blow job in a psychic's office while trying to communicate with a dead lover, though you could argue it is sex itself that's being mocked--especially in the scene at a swingers' party, where the spectacle of heterosexual lust and power games makes one long for any reminder that copulation can also involve affection and tenderness.

There is no affection or tenderness in Bruno, not even when he acts these emotions out in the portrayal of the relationship between himself and his assistant, which provides what plot there is in this series of sketches. But there is plenty of ridicule--of celebrities, swingers, Hasidim, Palestinians, not to mention the judgmental provinciality of a TV talk-show audience that is mostly African American. Bruno is not bad or good for the gays; it is mostly a sequel for Sacha Baron Cohen, who remains by far the bravest, most interesting comic working, so that one can't wait to see what he does next. Still, where he and this culture of ours are going is hard to predict. (Hung, a sub-rosa concept that one thought peculiar to gay men, is now a show on HBO.) Are Americans becoming tolerant or merely desensitized? In a democratic, scientific culture in which no topic can be off limits, where does comedy go? It's amazing nowadays how unrattled young people are (socially, at least) by gayness. Bruno wants to remind us that in some places--notably the American South, his favorite target--hard-core prejudice and homophobia are still alive. And yet, the movie doesn't quite prove that, because its method is so unclear: who sets up the lights, allows the cameras in, edits the reaction shots, who's in on the joke and who isn't? Besides, the suspicion is always there that Cohen himself finds same-sex sex nonsense: "You made my face pregnant," Bruno says to a man he's had sex with--a line that seems to mock sex between men for being sterile.

In the end, Bruno is like those Woody Allen movies that sound hilarious when you're recounting the jokes afterwards to someone who didn't go. The jokes are excellent, but the movie was bad. As to whether Bruno, and so many of the jokes being made in movies nowadays that have gay characters, are examples of homophobia or send-ups of it, parse them as you will. There's so much being attacked that the gay theme is virtually lost in the shuffle. Yes, the strangely moving climactic scene in a wrestling arena is flagrant proof that people want to see men fight, not kiss (men kissing is a visual that will never stop upsetting people), but surely most viewers know that Bruno is not your average gay man. The people who think he is are not likely to go to this movie. A friend who saw Bruno in Washington, D.C., said the theater was packed, but I could not help wonder if the emptiness of the theater in which I laughed alone at Bruno was evidence of the real homophobia (the one gay writers face): most straights have no interest in gay characters--unless the empty seats were there because they'd found out that the movie is as unfunny as it is funny. One thing you have to give it credit for: Bruno insults everyone, including the audience.

Bruno

By/with Sacha Baron Cohen

Directed by Larry Charles

Andrew Holleran's latest book, Chronicles of a Plague, Revisited, a collection of essays, was published last year.