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Bruno continues to provoke
Bruno. Gay pride?
Press still arguing whether film encourages homophobia
Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno premiered in London last week (it's on nationwide release on July 10), and the debate concerning its intent and potential for creating homophobia goes on.
This month's Attitude pits human rights activist Peter Tatchell, Simon Gage, the magazine's senior contributing editor and Charles Gant, film editor of Heat against each other (meanwhile today's Daily Mail suggests - via a few clutched straws - that Sacha Baron Cohen only gave an interview to the UK's leading gay monthly as a way of appeasing gay dissenters).
Tatchell questions whether the film's provocation is worth the inherent dangers: "While the film scores plenty of laughs by mercilessly exposing dim-witted homophobes, Bruno's persona also embodies some really lazy, crude gay stereotypes. A self-obsessed "cockaholic", he is a shallow bitchy queen who uses and abuses everyone around him. I fear that a few low-life hetties might view this movie as validation of their homophobia."
Gage thinks that it's the straights who should be offended, after Baron Cohen holds up a mirror for them to see their homophobia when faced by a character "so stereotyped as to be almost a pastiche on the stereotype," and values the film's educational effect on a liberal middle class that never witnesses the true nastiness of bigotry.
Although Gant is concerned that the opening section is "not about discomfiting prejudiced Americans...," he regards Bruno as brave and interesting. "What the unreconstructed audience will make of it is anyone's guess. If they have their prejudices nourished as well as challenged, that may not be the worst thing that occurs in multiplexes across the land this summer."
Meanwhile, in the Guardian, Philip Hensher wished that his gay friends had not refused to attend the premiere, as they would now see Baron Cohen as "not a bigot but, self-evidently, a remarkably brave man; that his satirical subject is the absurd posturing of a heterosexuality in terrible crisis."
