DIRECTED BY Larry Charles
STARRING Sacha Baron Cohen, Gustaf Hammarsten
US 2009 83 mins
I thought there’d be more to say about Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat. The film – substituting a gay Austrian fashionista for the cheerful cretin from Kazakhstan – seems to teem with discussion-points, even more than its predecessor. How much is staged? Did people know it was a put-on? What does it say about the latent homophobia in Western society? What drives Baron Cohen – an urbane fellow in real life, engaged to comic actress Isla Fisher – to carry out these outrageous provocations?
Yet there’s really not much to say about it. How much is staged? Almost all of it, with a few obvious exceptions – mostly the scenes where Bruno encounters folks even freakier than himself, like a pair of identical-twin “charity PR consultants” who can’t even say ‘Darfur’. Did people know it was a put-on? That depends. Sometimes – when Bruno goes in for Army training, or when he tries to solve the Middle East problem by singing a song and telling the Palestinians to give the Pyramids back to the Israelis – his interlocutors are clearly in on the joke, or they’d walk out in a huff. Other times, as with Bruno’s incendiary appearances in front of a talk-show audience or a redneck mob of wrestling fans, the crowds don’t seem to know what’s going to happen in advance – but they must’ve known something was going to happen, if only because they knew a film was being made (they’d have signed consent forms the moment they arrived, long before cameras started rolling). These scenes are theatre, even if the audience ends up improvising along with the actor.
What does Bruno say about latent homophobia? Very little, really. For a start, the first half isn’t even about Bruno’s gayness – it’s about his struggle to make it as a movie star in LA. Only in the last half-hour is sexuality directly addressed, when he visits a dodgy pastor who specialises in bringing gays to Jesus (an instance of Bruno meeting his match, freakiness-wise) and participates in proudly heterosexual activities like hunting trips and swingers’ parties – but not only are most of these scenes clearly staged, Bruno’s persona isn’t really definable as ‘homosexual’. What makes people uncomfortable isn’t that he’s gay, it’s that he’s weird. Unlike Borat – whose weirdness was perceived as being part of his foreign-ness – Bruno doesn’t stand for any one thing. To the agent in LA, he’s a no-hoper; to the talk-show audience, he’s a racist; to the wrestling crowd, he’s just a big fag.
The low-point is an interview with Ron Paul, the moderate Republican who ran against George Bush. This is one of the few scenes that obviously isn’t staged. Tired and weary from the campaign trail, the elderly politician tries to stay on-message – but Bruno comes on to him, finally dropping his trousers, causing Paul to storm out yelling about “queers”. It’s the only time when true latent homophobia comes out – but only by pushing a frail, tired, patently decent man to the limit. Whatever the intention, you end up feeling sorry for Ron Paul.
Which brings us to the one burning question: What drives Sacha Baron Cohen to do these things? Bruno isn’t really a comedy, more a piece of performance-art – and SBC’s schtick is an intellectual equivalent of the Jackass stunts, the show where young men burn, beat and cut themselves to show how ‘hard’ they are. Baron Cohen is just as fearless, wading into situations of extreme embarrassment; the difference is the Jackass crew only hurt themselves, whereas SBC stages collisions, often with collateral damage (like Ron Paul). In the end, for all his obvious talent, there’s something slightly arrogant about his m.o. We leave Bruno up where he belongs, away from the rednecks and little people, singing his song in the company of Bono, Sting, Elton John and Chris Martin – all presumably agreeing to appear as a favour to their close personal friend, Sacha Baron Cohen. It’s repulsive, and not in a good way.
17 AGAIN ***
DIRECTED BY Burr Steers
STARRING Zac Efron, Leslie Mann, Thomas Lennon, Matthew Perry
US 2009 102 mins
“It’s a classic transformation story,” says Ned the eccentric millionaire in 17 Again – and so it is. From Vice Versa to Freaky Friday, from Big to 13 Going on 30, the theme of youngsters turned into adults and/or adults turned into youngsters is a movie staple, hinging on the obvious paradox that half of us wish they were grown-up and the other half wish they were young again.
Actually, Mike (Matthew Perry) doesn’t particularly want to be young again. It’s true that his life is a mess. His wife – and former high-school sweetheart – is divorcing him; his teenage kids don’t want to know him; he’s surrounded by younger women who ignore him, and tormented by his wife’s feminist friend. In short, he’s emasculated, a far cry from his days as a high-school basketball star in 1989 – but he’s still shocked when he wakes up to find his 17-year-old self (Zac Efron) staring back at him in the mirror.
At first, Mike just wants to be old again – but he soon discovers that, as a 17-year-old, he can get close to his kids and help them with their problems (like Mrs Doubtfire, he does it for the children). The result is formulaic, but it has a certain charm – directed by Burr Steers, who made the even more charming Igby Goes Down seven years ago – mostly because it’s played big. Efron (the sensible-looking star of High School Musical) gives impassioned speeches in front of the whole class, the film whipping up satisfying set-pieces with montages and cartoon effects – but the extrovert, effervescent quality bumps against our hero’s situation and the reality of his “disappointing” life, so the film is always a mix of teen-movie perkiness and the poignancy of second chances.
Saucy humour helps. Teenage Mike is hot for his wife (Leslie Mann) – except she’s now his best friend’s mother, both flattered and alarmed by the attentions of this young boy who holds her close and dances to ‘their’ song; meanwhile, Mike also has to fend off the attentions of underage minxes with come-on lines like “I was kicked off the cheerleader squad for being too flexible”. 17 Again isn’t much – but it has a rollicking, wide-open vibe, and at least it seems to be having fun with its plot. If it were a person, it might actually be a 17-year-old, as opposed to a cynical Hollywood shark making films for 17-year-olds. That’s a rare thing nowadays.
Restore your faith in cinema: the Summer Open-Air Movie Marathon
It’s not much but it’s all we’ve got. I speak, of course, of the Cyprus movie calendar, with its clutch of small but undeniable annual highlights – the salt in our cinematic lives, spicing what might otherwise be a monotonous diet of rom-coms and sci-fi action movies.
There’s Cyprus Film Days in March, that crazy week of two-dozen films crammed in a mere seven days. There’s the French Film Festival at the Friends of the Cinema Society, usually just before Christmas. There’s the two documentary festivals, one in February, the other in August. There’s Images & Views of the Alternative Cinema in June, showing ultra-rare ‘underground’ movies you might never get a chance to see if you lived in London or New York for 20 years. And of course there’s the Summer Open-Air Movie Marathon at the Constantia Theatre in Nicosia – not the most high-powered festival but the most pleasant, and the most popular. Few things lift the spirits more reliably than sipping your drink, feeling the summer breeze on your face and arms, while all around you a full house is absorbed in a French relationship drama or laughing at the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. It’s en
ough to restore one’s faith in cinema.
That said, the Marathon has changed direction in the past couple of years, no longer a potpourri of old and new but more like the summer edition of the aforementioned Friends of the Cinema. This year, of the 17 films on offer – running from July 15 to August 30 – two are classics, three are kids’ movies, while the remaining 12 are (primarily) European films from the past 10 years. Still a mouth-watering array, but not quite the thrillingly diverse buffet it used to be.
Here’s the breakdown, by unofficial category, with star ratings for films I’ve seen:
KIDS’ FILMS: Bolt – already shown in cinemas, and the only American film in the Marathon – is a Hollywood cartoon about a superhero dog. The other two are more unusual: The Boy Who Wanted to Do the Impossible is Danish animation (with Greek subtitles), The Wooden Camera a South African drama for older children,
CLASSICS: Only two this year, but they’re big ones. Tokyo Story (****) is among the great classics of world cinema – voted the 5th greatest film of all time in the Sight & Sound international critics’ poll of 2002 – though its ruefully profound message (“Isn’t life disappointing?”) may not be entirely suited to the Summer Open-Air Experience. Lola Montes is by Max Ophuls, a famous ‘lost film’ about a 19th-century courtesan, recently restored to full vibrant colour.
DOCUMENTARIES: Two music documentaries: Iberia (directed by Carlos Saura) is a dance piece with unusually-staged flamenco performances, Moro no Brasil is a Buena Vista-style road movie in search of Brazilian folk musicians. The Take is an anti-globalisation tract, taking a workers’ strike in Argentina as its starting-point. And The Story of the Weeping Camel is a much-acclaimed fact/fiction hybrid about a family of Mongolian herders facing a crisis when “a mother camel rejects her newborn calf”.
RECENT NON-HOLLYWOOD FILMS: Highlights include Small Crime (**), a charming Greek film by Cypriot-born director Christos Georgiou; the ingenious Georgian/French thriller 13 Tzameti (***) which plays like an arty version of the Hostel horrors; another look at Gomorra (***), the award-winning Italian drama about the Neapolitan Mafia; Dans Paris (***), an offbeat French drama starring free-spirited heartthrob Louis Garrel; Iron Island (****), a superb Iranian film set on an oil tanker turned into a kind of refugee camp, ruled by a ruthless captain; and Saving Grace, the British comedy with Brenda Blethyn as a middle-aged widow who starts growing marijuana to make ends meet.
July 19: Tokyo Story
July 22: Ten Minutes Older – The Cello
July 24: Small Crime
July 20, 26: Bolt
July 30: Moro No Brasil
July 29, 31: Saving Grace
August 1, 3: Lola Montes
August 2, 9: 13 Tzameti
August 5, 10: Gomorra
August 7, 12: The Story Of The Weeping Camel
August 14, 22: Dans Paris
August 16, 19: The Boy Who Wanted To Do The Impossible
August 17: Emmas Gluck
August 26, 29: The Take
August 23: Iberia
August 21, 24: The Wooden Camera
August 28, 30: Iron Island
Films start at 9 p.m. at the Constantia Theatre, Solonos Michaelides 15, Pallouriotissa. Call 22-348203 for more information
