On Late Night With David Letterman, it was riotously funny to watch Sacha Baron Cohen accept accolades for the quarter-billion-dollar success of Borat, then explain how, for his new film, Bruno, he set up a meeting with a West Bank terrorist and staged a potentially deadly cage match in Arkansas. I eagerly await the "making of" documentary on DVD.
In fact, that appearance had everything the feature film lacks: a lucid explanation for the action in the movie and an interlocutor, Letterman, who could provide a sane response to extreme material. If Cohen persists in his current mode of avant-garde comic shock treatment, I suggest he sign up someone like Letterman to be his sidekick.
Through most of Bruno, yesterday's emperor of comedy truly has no clothes. This globe-trotting debacle features Cohen as the gay Austrian fashionista who is always stripping down to his thong, or less. For a portrait of a monomaniac, it's alarmingly random. For an expose of charlatans who range from a psychic to celebrity-charity consultants, it's maddeningly shoddy.
Cohen's brilliant Borat had an aesthetic framework - an intrepid Kazakhstan TV reporter's attempt to make a documentary about the state of the U.S. while maneuvering to meet Pamela Anderson. You knew why the camera was present in every scene; the American citizens caught in its gaze responded realistically.
Borat also had a raison d'etre: Cohen found a devilishly clever way for audiences to process his antihero's political incorrectness. Viewers sympathized with Borat for his lost-boy status as a clueless journalist lost in America and obsessed with Anderson. They grew exasperated at his racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and misogyny.
Bruno uses the same mockumentary form without establishing a structure or a purpose. Bruno has no camera crew, only an on-and-off assistant named Lutz. Still, the movie's faux-documentary camera follows Bruno everywhere - it even, apparently, follows his voice, to the office of a Los Angeles agent who calls him at an inopportune intimate moment.
The result might look like home movies, but it doesn't feel like home movies. It's too forced. Beyond that, it's hard to tell what Cohen is going for beyond howls of comic disbelief - the kind of laugh that says, "I can't believe he did that!" Bruno's anything-for-a-gasp brand of smash-and-grab comedy proves that even a "reality" farce can give off flop sweat.
