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Brüno
I’m on Sacha Baron Cohen’s side, I really am. Well, I want to be. He seems to be a smart, brilliant comic, if not a good actor. But when I saw Borat, Culture Learnings of America… I was horrified.
As a minority who spent 8 years in the United States, I am all for exposing the cultural naiiveness of Americans. Exposing them to other cultures and ways of life, I believe would help Americans set better local and foreign policies.
Borat, however funny and insightful at times it was, seemed to be nothing more than a European teenager’s crude recording of his idea of a good time: punking Americans. That particular European teenager had ambitions to eradicate racism in American (Europe too?) but I just thought it was done in such an uncouth way that the message did not get through. Did it? Are Americans better off now for having seen Borat?
After reading this review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker about Brüno, it seems that Brüno is going the same way.
“Could that be Baron Cohen’s cunning plan? Might he actually be in the business of revealing our cauterized senses, and the wound where our finer judgments are meant to be? A nice idea, but I’m afraid that “Brüno” feels hopelessly complicit in the prejudices that it presumes to deride”, said Lane.
“wholly unsuitable for children, yet propelled by a nagging puerility that will appeal only to those in the vortex of puberty, or to adults who have failed to progress beyond it. Call it, at best, a gaudy celebration of free speech”.
Will you be going down to watch Brüno?
Maybe I’m taking it too seriously, you say. It’s all in jest, isn’t it? Ah, I guess I’m a little old fashioned that way - for I think Sacha Baron Cohen’s brilliance and his mighty good intentions are lost in his crude execution.
