Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno.
There's a legendary moment in Borat when you stop laughing and move on to a sort of desperate, horrified gasping because what you're seeing is, literally, beyond funny. That moment, of course, is the nude wrestling match between Borat, a hairy beanpole of a broadcaster from Kazakhstan, and his producer, a mountain of bearded blubber. When you're presented with a sight like that--the most purely awful spectacle since Divine sampled dog poop at the end of John Waters' Pink Flamingos--something more than mere laughter is required. Like maybe a call to 911.
There's nothing quite that shock-and-awesome in Brüno, in which Sacha Baron Cohen is a gay Austrian fashionista who sets himself loose upon an unsuspecting world. How could there be? Since we now know there's nothing Baron Cohen won't do, we can't really be surprised when he does it. Make no mistake--the man who once asked an enraged neo-Nazi if he used moisturizer is still willing to go places you wouldn't go in body armor. So he gives us Brüno on a camping trip trying to seduce some revolted Alabama hunters; Brüno getting belt-whipped--hard--by a nude dominatrix; Brüno in a steel-cage match melting into wet kisses with his opponent while the crowd goes wild--and not in a good way. But even when Brüno is in a hotel room infuriating members of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades--a situation that needs to be handled with care, especially if the guy handling it is a fey blond who hasn't heard that hot pants went out with Charlie's Angels--you think, Hey, at least they're not in a bear hug.
It's safe to say that after more than a decade honing his characters on television and in films, Baron Cohen is more than a comedian. He's the world's most famous performance artist, the inventor of a perfect hybrid of documentary and mockumentary, reality TV and psychodrama, Jackass and Andy Kaufman. When he gets the mixture just right, he creates situations of unbearable tension that at the same time turn out to be unbearably funny. For instance, at one point Brüno does a Madonna/Angelina, coming back from Africa with a baby. Then he appears as a guest on an actual talk show and tells the mostly African-American audience that he got the kid by trading an iPod for him. He also has the boy dressed in a T shirt that says gayby. The crowd goes wild--and not in a good way. Scenes like that are the emotional equivalent of Guantánamo stress positions. They're very uncomfortable, and sometimes you're left in them for a long time. Maybe laughter is the only way out.
For the record, Brüno, like Borat, was directed by Larry Charles. And as with Borat, the story in Brüno is just the merest pretext for stringing together provocations. At the beginning, Brüno is the hip-cocking host of Funkyzeit, a late-night Austrian TV show that tours the world of style. When he wrecks a runway show and ends up shunned by the Euro-fashion crowd, he lights out for the Middle East, Africa and the U.S. to become "the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler." At which point Brüno becomes, again like Borat, a road comedy, the odyssey of an outlandish man whose greatest talent--actually, his only talent--is to bring out the worst in other people. And Brüno's basic m.o., like Borat's, is to go into the world with a camera to bewilder and infuriate people, never failing to prove that anger and stupidity are the permanent default modes of the human brain.