British satirist Sacha Baron Cohen rarely does interviews, at least as himself, for his confrontational comedy. He occasionally will talk to the media "in character" as Ali G or Borat or Bruno. That either adds to the mystique or accelerates the madness of each character.
So it comes as a shock, with a dash of awe, to find him teaming with director Larry Charles in an open, thoughtful and occasionally humourous commentary for Bruno. Their revelations are the highlight of this week's debut of Bruno on DVD and Blu-ray.
The candid commentary is actually better than experiencing the movie by itself. Bruno is mostly awkward, and just as often stupid as it is clever. Borat had generated slack-jawed fascination; Bruno just creates discomfort.
Cohen plays Bruno Gehard, a self-styled Austrian fashionista who goes to Hollywood to get famous after his embarrassing crash-and-burn in Milan. As in Borat, Cohen interacts with real people, most of whom do not know that Bruno is acted and they are being set up for scenes in a fictional, semi-scripted film. While there are savagely brilliant moments, there are also misfires as Cohen and Charles tackle political posturing, homophobia, religious and racial prejudice, the extremes of the military and the absurdity of fame, fashion and all things superficially fabulous.
On the commentary, Cohen and Charles put it all out there about fashion shows, desperate stage parents, crazed cage-fight fans and other targets. For DVD, it is a feature-length audio track (with an odd mid-film pause). On the Blu-ray, it is a video commentary.
Otherwise, the DVD and Blu-ray share most extras, including 60 minutes of alternative, deleted and extended scenes, plus an interview with the real Hollywood agent, Lloyd Robinson, who happily fell for the Bruno ruse.
Among the deleted scenes is a weird encounter with LaToya Jackson, which was cut from the movie after the death of Michael Jackson. Jackson sits on "a Mexican chair person" and plucks sushi from the chest of a naked man serving as a table. Yikes!
Back to the commentary. In one scene -- a psychic reading -- Cohen absurdly mimics performing oral sex on an invisible Milli Vanilli. "This movie obviously was testing the limits of what people found acceptable in terms of sexuality," Cohen says.
In another scene, real-life Hollywood twins Nicole and Suzanne Defosset, charity PR consultants, say incredibly stupid things about how and why celebrities adopt charity causes. "They're not being forced to say these things," Charles says. "This is their natural response to these questions." Cohen adds, "And this is actually the first time in the movie where I almost crack up," Cohen offers. "When they start talking about making bracelets out of extinct animals, I almost laughed."
Their exploits in the Middle East were different. As "the only Jews in Jordan" they were invited to dinner at the royal palace, because one royal is a fan of Ali G and knew who Bruno was. Cohen says he was treated with respect. "It actually was sort of inspiring. It was great!"
Less so in Israel. Cohen, dressed in mock-Hassidic clothing, was chased by a Jewish mob of extremists. He thought he would die. "In this movie, you see a lot of people who want to hurt you, who hate you. (But) these guys wanted to kill me! ... There was a wild kind of irony that the closest I got to getting killed was by my own people."
The revelations continue. Cohen should be himself more often.
