Whether getting slapped with an NC-17 rating is snaps for an envelope-torching maverick or just a publicity ploy to promote his cutting-edge comedy, it certainly has turned us into a bunch of rubberneckers.
In case you haven’t yet caught eye of the red-band trailer in vogue, ‘Br’uuml;no’ makes ‘Zoolander’ look safer than seat belts.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s definitely mastered puckish orchestrations of culturally insensitive pranks in heavily accented improv ‘mdash; and curved through a European lithp, his two-and-a-half minute trailer pedals ‘Chappelle’s Show’ on rainbow steroids.
Aside from fashion-forward cut-offs and Milanese logos, it’s the same old shtick: Foreign reporter comes stateside, seeking acceptance, but mostly just turns a candid camera on our less than attractive American culture. But after a two year interim, Cohen’s learned to pilot his tomfoolery to transgressive heights ‘mdash; or amoral lows, depending on how much comedic leg room you give the guy.
At least, that was the consensus when it screened at SXWS and ruffled enough feathers to make some critics say it made ‘Borat”s nude scenes look like ‘child’s play.’
Now that we’re all good and familiar with his asinine aesthetic and soft-core sensibilities, it’s not surprising that ‘Br’uuml;no’ is already being hell-hounded. But what might be, is the fact that it’s being stood behind confidently by the cash-money millionaires at Universal.
While Paramount may have been the first to take a limp lance at the oft-ostentatious world of diet pills and textile ‘mdash; ‘Zoolander’ matched kid-gloved satire with twice as much slapstick ‘mdash; it opted to spare our feelings and stick within PC perforations. I flip past it every time it’s looped on TBS, rather than soap box anything remotely easy to critque.
Accordinigly, Kubrick might have been able to ride Columbia with ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ but it’s only because half the humor was armor-plated in phallic symbols and Peter Sellers. Most satires have to learn to stay afloat without a studio and material likely to offend someone.
Waiving studio funds in order to protect their right to effectively piss off who ever they wanted, satirists like Robert Downey Sr. and Ralph Bakshi fastened their lampoons to irreverent plots in the ’60s and ’70s. As one of my favorite films from a decade alchemizing economic crisis into cinema’s golden age, ‘Putney Swope’ imagined what would happen if black militants rubbed shoulders with Madison Avenue in an advertising agency takeover ‘mdash; then slammed it with jive, jazz and product placement.
‘Fritz the Cat’ did much of the same. Animating a tabby arguably hornier than comic-book creator R. Crumb, Bakshi told the X-rated saga of a ‘sophisticated, up-to-the-minute feline college student.’ Watching Fritz relish in the frisky free-love movement while experimenting with drugs, riots and group sex, it isn’t difficult to understand why post-menopausal audiences were swift to cry bestiality, though younger ones generally perceived the political subtext. After all, it was an idealized era in which everyone liked to think of themselves as an artists who hated Jesus;. the more low-budget and self-made the project, the more edgy, contemporary and poisonously caustic.’
What people seem to forget is that Cohen’s inherited comedy ‘mdash; for all its misappropriated attention and exaggerated color ‘mdash; holds a mirror to petrified ideologies anchored in America’s blind spots. And while I’m sure it won’t stick to a stringent skeleton of social satire, ‘Br’uuml;no’ looks to glean most of its commentary from our obsession with the tabloids, Bible-belt homophobia and suburban S’amp;M.’
The most unfortunate
turn of news though isn’t that ‘Br’uuml;no’ still has to wait three months until opening, but that most of the time, satire can still be so misunderstood ‘mdash; either by those finding it overtly offensive or by viewers who merely reaffirm their prejudices with every joke.
Let’s just hope Cohen doesn’t run off to Africa at the height of his career ‘mdash; for his sake and ours.