APOCRYPHAL PRESS ARTS CRITICISM

SHEKI MBEKI REVIEWS

SACHA BARON COHEN'S BRUNO

Friday, August 07, 2009. Last night I visited a local cinemaplex to investigate a new exercise in Sacha Baron Cohenism, a cinematic phenomenon that has swept our film houses. His new joint (it is far too serious and complex to call it a “movie”) Bruno, is a work of art that explores the soft underbelly, the conventionalism, and the downright foolishness of those who are not Sacha Baron Cohen. Hiding in the interstices of what seems at first to be the dumbest movie ever made is a profound philosophical core that, like the emperor’s new clothes, is visible only to the wise and deep among us who, it is safe to say, are very few in number.

Baron Cohen –so young, so titled–creates an apparently hideous character as the central figure in what seems to be an awful entertainment as a divining rod to find insight. Ironic it is that Bruno, an exquisitely shallow man, is the litmus test for profundity, for the film reveals things that otherwise would remain hidden, such as various body parts of Baron Cohen’s that, like the meaning of this cinematic triumph, often remain unseen.

The apotheosis of this anatomical revelation comes when a fully erect penis, ostensibly Baron Cohen’s, points out at the audience, as if to say, “beware,” in the manner of Babe Ruth pointing his bat at the center field bleachers in the 1932 World Series. Unlike Ruth, whose quotidian understanding left him no choice but to hit a home run to the very place to which he had pointed, Baron Cohen teasingly leaves the meaning of this display of turgid concupiscence to the imaginations of thoughtful audience members, of which group none were present at the showing I attended.

Perhaps he wanted his viewers to “think outside the box,” which, clearly, was where the rigid digit was at the moment we saw it.

To those who take offense at the surface of the humor, which was extremely crude, Baron Cohen seems to say, “go deeper, go deeper.” Bruno is a treasure of metaphor and meta-meaning. If you come out of the theater shaking your head and saying, “this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” you will, of course, be right. But then stop a moment and ask yourself “what is all this stupidity trying to tell me?”