Better late than never… a few spoilers in here, so be warned. Toronto wrap up coming next and NYFF starting soon…
One of the “surprise screenings” at this year’s Toronto Film Festival was Christophe Honoré‘s latest, Making Plans For Lena. How much of a surprise? So much so that a colleague told me about the press screening just before the lights went down at a film starting almost simultaneously, so I broke the hell out like I had the chicken pox, ran to the subway and made it in time to discover an almost empty theater; there were maybe 12 people there? No one seemed to know the screening was happening. Surprise! C’est la vie, more for me.
Making Plans For Lena is the story of a mother, ex-wife, sister and daughter named Lena (Chiara Mastroianni, who turns in the best performance of her career), a woman who seems as confused by her own needs and desires as her family and friends seem certain of their own. And why not? Complications abound; on a visit to her parents’ country home with children in tow, Lena is confronted by the judgements and expectations of her mother Annie (played by Marie-Christine Barrault, as luminous here as she was in Stardust Memories all those years ago), the drippy romance of her brother Gulvan (Julian Honoré) and his girlfriend Elise (Honoré regular Alice Butaud), the emotional roller-coaster of her smoking, drinking pregnant sister Frédérique (an hilariously edgy Marina Foïs) and the unexpected appearance of her ex-husband Nigel (Jean-Marc Barr). Outside of the discomforts of family life, Lena is facing a timely predicament; unemployed and looking for work, Lena left Nigel without a word, loading her belongings into her father’s car and setting herself and the children up with her parents, a newly single mother. Suddenly alone, and open to the possibility of a relationship with a new lover (Louis Garrell, naturellement), Lena makes a major life decision that throws her character into stark relief against the backdrop of otherwise reasonable expectations.
Making Plans For Lena
Making Plans For Lena seems, upon a single, rather unexpected viewing, to be a film that finally addresses the enigma of French womanhood and, in particular, the director’s attitude toward the feminine hemisphere of love. Despite the gravity of Lena’s situation, Honoré remains playful and somewhat cryptic about his character’s motivations, instead focusing on the impact of their actions on those around them. Instead of a psychological, character-driven approach to all of his dilemmas, Honoré does what he does best—he turns to the mythology of cinema to draw subtle connections between his characters. In Dans Paris, there was Roman Duris breaking into sad songs when he discussed his feelings while his brother, played by Louis Garrell, hopped from bed to bed like some enchanting nouvelle vague lothario. In Love Songs, the characters again broke into song to express their true feelings, but there the musical numbers flowered into muted versions of old Hollywood glamour. In Lena, Honoré instead chooses to insert a long, strange period fable set in the middle ages, that seems to presage a curse upon Lena’s own heart; a princess only wants to dance with a true partner, but she is so desired by men she cannot find happiness. Instead, each of her suitors falls dead after betraying her pure intentions only to be replaced by another man who doesn’t understand, who in turn falls dead. This passage in the film seems to describe Lena’s feelings about how she is seen and understood by those who love her, and as self-images go, it betrays the sad “otherness” that Lena feels in her own skin; she exists outside the realm of female expectation and, exhausted by suppressing her desire, can’t help but feel the sting of judgement.
The film’s title in French, Non ma fille tu n’iras pas danser, literally means “No, my daughter, you will not dance ” and it goes much further toward explaining Honoré‘s intentions with this beguiling film than the English title Making Plans For Lena (a pun on the great XTC song Making Plans For Nigel which is features in a key moment in the film). Honoré is interested in the social and familial pressures that keep Lena’s true self unknowable, both to her and to us, and tries to build a framework for her ultimate decision that makes it seem both tragic and inevitable. Everything and everyone is bearing down upon a woman who is trying her best to honor her own needs and feelings, and while such a dramatic scenario would be pure grist for someone like Fassbinder or, say, Douglas Sirk, Honoré is a far more elliptical filmmaker than they are; instead of explaining or even dramatizing the depth of Lena’s confusion, he lets Mastroianni carry the load, constantly moving her from room to room, situation to situation, feeling to feeling until the sting of it all pushes her away from the trappings of her life and into the unknown. The film quite literally ends with a beginning and obviously bears a repeat viewing, but it was affecting for me to try to connect with this story and to feel as if I was on the precipice of understanding only to have the rock tumble away from me, back down the hill. I’ll be happy to try and push it up again.
Why Not?: XTC, Making Plans For Nigel
Another moving and intimate film that confronts this same dilemma, this need for a woman to abdicate her sense of responsibility in the name of self-realization, is François Ozon’s tremendous La Refuge which sees the director return to the tonal mastery he displayed in Under The Sand. Isabelle Carré (who, let’s be honest, is the French Amy Adams… and I mean that in the best sense) plays Mousse, a drug addict who awakens to discover that she and her wealthy lover (and fellow junkie) Louis (Melvil Poupaud) have overdosed on some bad heroin. She has survived, he has not, which deeply complicates the fact that Mousse is pregnant with his child. Louis’ rich parents demand that Mousse end the pregnancy, but instead Mousse heads off to a friend’s oceanside home to ride out the pregnancy (and her methadone prescription) in solitude. Louis’ brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy) shows up one day, passing through on holiday and interested to see how Mousse is coping in the aftermath of their mutual loss. Something greater than a friendship forms between the two, something akin to family, and after Mousse returns to Paris to give birth, Paul arrives to greet his niece, setting up a wrenching finale that pays off beautifully.
I have long admired, defended and been moved by the dexterity of Ozon’s filmmaking, and while so many seem to struggle understanding the way in which he uses genre to outline his concerns, from the campy, kitschy tradition of a certain strain of gay culture that spans the ages to Fassbinderian melodrama to the psychological thriller straight through to the fairy tale, each of Ozon’s films bears the mark of a true auteur whose visual strategies, direction of actors and framing underscore a singular approach to cinematic storytelling. When you sit down to watch Ozon, you may not know which side of himself he will express, but each and every frame is of a piece with his unique voice. It seems to me that Ozon is deeply undervalued in both the queer community and the film community as a whole and I am not sure why that is. It may be that while many of his films don’t address the issues of queer politics and desire directly, each of them is steeped in the grand (and wonderful) tradition of queer filmmaking and each draws deeply from the well of a certain gay aesthetic, one that walks a tightrope between melodrama and drama, with a wink and a kiss on the cheek to what has come before.
Le Refuge
Which is not to say that a chubby breeder like me can’t find a way into Ozon’s work; I’ve seen almost every feature film he’s made and I am knocked out by almost all of them (I’ll admit I didn’t love Sitcom, although I certainly laughed through it). Is it that Ozon is so prolific in the age of fast fast fast mass media that no one can keep up with his work? Or does it say something unthinkable about the state of our cinema in general that a great director like Ozon would be as marginalized by American audiences as he seems to be? I know it is not a great time for foreign film in this country, but if movies like Under The Sand or Swimming Pool or 8 Women or 5x2 or A Time To Rest barely make a dent in the community of people who care about these films, I’m not sure there is much I can continue to hope for. Le Refuge is more than just a continuation of Ozon’s work and concerns—it is not just “The new Ozon”—it is a beautifully registered drama full of emotional conflict, each frame of which feels true to the heart of the matter at hand. Ozon’s work continues to be a rare accomplishment, a cinema I’d rather celebrate, debate and discuss today than look fondly upon tomorrow.
If you look at the recent history of the independent film business, the landscape is littered with the remnants of failed distribution and production companies, most of them small, all of them full of bright, passionate people willing to risk something of themselves to help bring movies to the screen. For most filmgoers, the absence or presence of films from companies like Wellspring, ThinkFilm and the like is, for the most part, irrelevant; As much as people like me follow the daily ins and outs of the independent film business, there are millions of others who simply check their local listings and just go and see whatever looks good. That doesn’t change the fact that, without a community of passionate individuals who get great films made and seen, there would be no cinema for someone like me to love. And while the business has always had winners and losers, in the small world of independent cinema, the losses are felt more deeply, become more personal.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s moving Father of My Children is an elegy for those losses and a reminder of just how fragile the work of getting films made can be. Most cinematic representations of the film producer have been grotesques, but Hansen-Love finds the nurturing heart of film production in the chaos of the offices of Moon Films, a small Parisian production company headed by Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), a chain smoking hustler fighting to maintain some semblance of balance between his rapidly failing business and his love for his wife and three beautiful daughters. Grégoire spends the first half of the film juggling his obligations until, after series of funding disasters and production delays, the specter of overwhelming debt materializes and Grégoire takes drastic, unforeseen action to bring some finality to his inescapable situation and suddenly what was a tragicomic look at the business of filmmaking becomes the story of a family struggling to come to terms with the end of the line.
Father Of My Children
Hansen-Løve, who I first remember seeing as an actress, portraying the beautiful young student who inherits a Joseph Beuys painting in Olivier Assayas’ Late August, Early September, has clearly learned a thing or two from her mentors; Her fluent, intimate camera and tonal mastery would be surprising and touching in a director twice her age. Father Of My Children is Hansen-Løve’s second feature (after All Is Forgiven, her 2007 feature debut), but her tenderness for her characters, from the dynamic and conflicted Grégoire to the multifaceted performance by Alice de Lencquesaing as his daughter Clémence, shows a complex insight into the hearts of her characters (not to mention a great skill for drawing restraint from her actors). Alice de Lencquesaing in particular has a deep capacity for feeling despite being such a young actress; Her performance in the film builds perfectly upon her work in Assayas’ Summer Hours and, to my mind, proves her to be a true artist I am looking forward to watching in the coming years.
Ultimately, as the story shifts from Grégoire’s point of view to the multiple perspectives of his wife and daughters, Father Of My Children flowers into a portrait of a family struggling to come to grips with tragedy and loss, all of it built around the dream of making movies. Hansen-Løve clearly understands the world of film production and knows that, by articulating the work itself, she pays honor to the men and women who believe in the power of cinema. As a portrait of the film production process, Hansen-Løve’s film brings to mind the messy struggles of Assayas’ Irma Vep, a company of hard-working, underpaid professionals working in cramped quarters and hoping to be a part of something special. Fortunately, in Hansen-Løve’s hands, they have succeeded.
Every once in a while, during some random holiday or another, I walk through my neighborhood and am approached by a pair of Hasidic men who stop me and ask that very question; Excuse me, are you Jewish? Not a very complicated question (I’m not Jewish), but still complicated by my family and my personal experience*. When I politely say “I’m sorry, no I’m not,” I think my own disappointment is far outweighed by their indifference and the desire to move on immediately and find someone who is Jewish. I always feel like I’m letting them down, that I am excluded, that maybe I’ll never know why they’re asking; what secrets might they hold in their hands?
I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, itself a perfect example of how American middle-class reform Judaism has been built on the dynamic of this precise interaction; the cultural and class aspirations of many American Jews rely on a carefully articulated walk on the tightrope between preserving the tropes of the Jewish religious and cultural tradition and assimilating relatively seamlessly into the fabric of American secular culture as a whole.
There is an entire universe of art and storytelling built around this intersection, from Philip Roth to Jonathan Safran Foer to the grand master himself, Woody Allen; the anxious tension that comes with being a “member of the tribe,” the push and pull between tradition and modernity has been the comic heart of Judaism’s representation in popular culture. Traditionally, in the case of Roth and Allen in particular, the tragicomic framework of the joke is built around the moern Jewish hero being misunderstood by the goyum set against his desire to shake off the baggage of his religious identity’s tropes (maternal guilt/marital responsibility/parental anxiety/professional success/sexual insecurity) and be free to simplify things, to be both things at once— Jewish and American— without the doubt, guilt and self-consciousness. Ultimately, these works demonstrate the realization that the phrase “American Jew” means that you’re wholly neither and something else entirely, something that is essentially both.
This dilemma is the heart and soul of Joel and Ethan Coen’s amazing new film A Serious Man, and as I write this, I wonder to myself if the question “are you Jewish?” will have a profound impact on the way in which this film is received and understood. I do know one thing; it is impossible for me to write about this film without discussing these issues and ideas, so I hope you’ll allow this atheist goy the benefit of the doubt and forgive whatever shortcomings may be contained herein.
A Serious Man is, essentially, a movie that perfectly articulates the specific dilemma of middle-class American Jews by rendering a knowing, note-perfect portrait of ways in which Jewish identity itself haunts the experience (and the physical world) of Larry Gopnik (a brilliant Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a Minnesota university whose marriage, sibling relationship, career and paternal responsibility all come into crisis in the summer of 1967.
The film opens with a prologue, set in an unnamed eastern European shtetl when a dybbuk (or is he?) appears at the door of a small home and sets a curse into motion, one that seems to bind Larry all those decades later as he attempts to hold the fragile threads of his suburban life together. The Gopniks live in what was once considered the ideal American community (a clichéd subdivision), but it is clear that these tidy homes, with their mid-century designs and well-manicured lawns, are an ill-fit for the community they propose to hold. Tensions abound; Larry’s wife has begun an unconsummated love affair with a touchy-feely alpha male and “they” want a divorce, his son’s Bar Mitzvah beckons, his racist goy of a neighbor doesn’t respect their shared property line, his mathematical savant of a brother is up to no good, and as Larry’s resources dwindle, he faces the prospect that he may not be granted tenure at work.
Instead of acting in the grand American fashion of “me first”, Larry instead follows the path of his experience and faith; he constantly tries to do what he feels is the good thing to do, to face down his troubles by submitting to them first and seeking the counsel of a series of rabbis, asking God “why?”. A Serious Man is essentially The Book of Job set against the liberal mores of the 1960’s; an existential shout into the void of life’s complications that is literally answered by God himself when, in the film’s final moments, that Old Testament fury comes calling, delivering the promise of greater suffering to come.
A Serious Man
A little bit of good news and a small moral compromise unleash hell for Larry and his community, and in the film’s final frames, the Coen’s comic touch, illuminated by the tradition of rabbi jokes, the anxiety of the first Torah reading (and, hilariously, lifting) and the futility of spiritual advice, gives way to a knockout blow of an ending, proving that Larry’s emotional understanding of the rules of his world are irrelevant in the face of an angry God. Which is, you know, the soul of the Torah itself and the underlying tenant of a faith that has endured centuries of suffering to temper its abundance of joy.
The film is also the spiritual cousin to Barton Fink, a film with its own hellish vision, but whereas Barton Fink’s hubris and misunderstanding of the “life of the mind” brought about his fiery downfall in the claustrophobic Hotel Earle, Larry Gopnik’s spiritual misunderstanding, his decision to finally allow his impeccable ethics (and therefore his identity) to be compromised ends up unravelling the entire fabric of meaning in his life. Despite his desperate struggle to be a serious, and thereby good, man, Larry transgresses, he crosses over from his ethical foundation and into the dirty, messy world of secular ambition. In his frustration with the (hilarious) ambiguities of his culture and faith, he essentially chooses the American way, and God is not pleased.
Despite the gravity of the stakes, A Serious Man is absolutely hilarious, hitting upon the texture of Jewish life like no other film before it. Every little note is a standout, from the slurping of chicken soup to a great visual pun on the iPod (kids will always be kids) from the amoral, foul-mouthed, drug dealing teenagers to the parade of absurdly stereotypical names of never-seen lawyers and doctors who are, of course, well known to everyone in the local community; the film’s situational, cultural and period details perfectly underscore Larry’s problem and showcase the tragicomic heart of the tribe.
The Coen Brothers have delivered what will surely become a classic, a film for all audiences that underscores its deep, philosophical questions about faith and fury with a knowing smile. Brilliant.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”—Milan Kundera
The brief history of films about the 1994 Rwandan genocide seem to range wildly, from glossy Oscar bait like Hotel Rwanda to the intimate, poetic beauty of Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo to the damning documentary Shake Hands With The Devil. But a look under the hood shows the most difficult truth about these films, whether they feature a big name movie star, a foreigner directing local non-actors or reportage on the moral failings of the international community; most of the films about the Rwandan genocide feature a distinctly Western touch and, unable to capture the emotional experience of the genocide itself, refract the issue of the Rwandan experience through the lens of something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. Even the brilliant Munyurangabo, which focuses on reconciliation in the years after the genocide, is only able to capture the ghostly remnants of those actual, murderous days, and Hotel Rwanda puts the murder on the other side of an iron fence, creating something akin to a Schindler’s List for the Tutsi people.
Cinema has proven wholly inadequate as a substitute for memory in telling the story of the murderous rampage that took place in Rwanda.
The Day God Walked Away, directed by the Belgian cinematographer Philippe van Leeuw (making his debut), takes a massive step forward in using the language of cinema to convey the horror of the genocide. Instead of making the genocide a pretext for grand statements about personal responsibility or the cultural and tribal conflicts that drove the Hutu majority to murder their Tutsi neighbors en masse, van Leeuw forgoes psychology, culture and the massive scale of death, distilling the genocide into the experience of a single Tutsi woman named Jacqueline (Rwandan pop star Ruth Niere, making a powerful debut). In his writing on the film, van Leeuw describes his inspiration for the story;
“In April 1992, some friends of mine returned from Rwanda following the emergency evacuation… Before they left, they hid Jacqueline, their children’s Rwandan nanny, in the attic of their house in Kigali, hoping that she would escape the massacre. They never knew what became of her.”
Thus begins van Leeuw’s film, which the imagines the genocidal experience from Jacqueline’s perspective; Hiding Anne Frank-like in a dirty attic while the Hutu militas search the home of her employers, Jacqueline rides out the first few days of her nightmare before escaping the house and fleeing into the bush, on a mission back to her home to find what has become of her children. What she discovers, and what that discovery inspires, is a devastating portait of sublimation in the name of survival; Jacqueline spends the overwhelming majority of the film in a wordless stupor, hiding in the forest surrounding her village (which has been entirely taken over by her former neighbors) and avoiding the roving bands of murderous locals, machetes in hand, boasting of rape and murder. By keeping Jacqueline in close-up and placing the horror and danger beyond the edges of the frame (the sound shoots around the theater, giving the impression of being completely surrounded), the terror of her experience is almost unbearable; death is always close and every human noise, each an otherwise desirable connection to humanity, feels like an imminent threat.
The Day God Walked Away
The lush green landscape of the forest and the harsh, unromanticized sunlight (no magic hour here) provide both exposure and cover for Jacqueline who, as portrayed by Niere, is almost too emotionally “blank” to carry the weight of what she has seen and felt, let alone to speak for the entirety of a genocide. Even the mutually benficial friendship Jacqueline forges with an Injured Man (Afazali Dewaele), whom she nurses back to relative health, seems slight when set against the depth of her humiliation and suffering. After several close calls and a penultimate act of near-violence that re-shapes the entire story (and gives a final outlet to the indignities she has suffered), Jacqueline makes a heart-breaking, existential choice that highlights both the banality of the violence and depth of the casual disregard for humanity that underscores the entire genocide. It is a powerful, hopeless finale to a traumatic, insufferable situation.
While the film ostensibly has the same problem shared by so many of its predecessors—mainly that it was not made by an African (or Rwandan) filmmaker and therefore suffers a little from an “outsider seeking to honor the reality of the victims” complex without a primary emotional knowledge of the depth of cultural meaning embodied in the genocidal reality—van Leeuw goes much further than most other filmmakers at taking the devastation from the realm of the surreal question of “how could this happen” to the more relevant cinematic issue of the experience itself. As such, van Leeuw honors the best of cinema by giving voice to the feelings of the victim and bringing the power of emotioal memory to bear on every single moment; the trauma suffered by Jacqueline is only one experience among a million, but van Leeuw makes sure it is precise and, most importantly, deeply felt.
“What separates Borat from the Jackass school of filmmaking is not the audacity and outrageousness of his public stunts (which, in my opinion, transcend Steve-O physicality and arrive at something much more meaningful,) but the political intent behind the humor. Because of the deeply unsettling political content of the film, Borat walks a razor-thin line between blistering social commentary and dangerously casual prejudice, but Cohen and the film achieve an absolute singularity of intent and vision. The question is, is the movie so smart and so strong that some of us end up laughing in sympathy and not in outrage? ”
—and after catching up with Cohen’s latest film Brüno this past weekend, it seems to me that the comedian has finally crossed the line into prejudice. The most disappointing part of this realization is not so much that the film completely muffs its opportunity to address homophobia in the United States in a meaningful (and very funny) way, but that it muffs that opportunity out of sheer laziness. Apologists may argue that Cohen’s recognition in the nation at large may have cost him the opportunity to execute his high-wire act with the hilarious intimacy on display in Borat, and maybe that was the case, but where the earlier film brought a immediacy to the subject of American prejudice by getting down and dirty in the homes and gathering places of the people, Brüno instead builds false spectacles to validate its own thesis that Americans are intolerant morons.
In Borat, Cohen put his ass on the line by walking into public situations, thereby violating the standards of polite American behavior and exposing the hypocrisy beneath the social contract; from his national anthem at the rodeo to his casual ride with sexist, racist frat boys in a Winnebago, Borat was a naive fiction, an outsider whose prejudices were mirrored inventions intended to draw out the opinions and ideas that lurk just beneath the surface, waiting to find a comfortable moment for their expression. What made the movie tick was Cohen’s ability to infiltrate existing situations and events; it was the danger of his exposure, of the fabric of his fiction being pulled back to reveal the man behind the curtain, that gave the film its sense of danger. The real drama of Borat was found in seeing how far the character could go without having the film’s entire premise collapse around him.
Brüno fails precisely because it lacks that sense of danger. There isn’t a single moment in the film that crackles with the excitement of dangerous reality and those moments that might have worked are stripped of their power by manipulative editing. In fact, the only moment that resonated for me as a viewer was a terrific long silence, a silence provided by three hunters who, like me, were simply refusing to fall for Cohen’s provocations. In general, and for whatever reason, Brüno is forced to manufacture its own big moments by staging large events, from a phony Jerry Springer-esque TV show that was seemingly intended to exploit the supposed racial divide over the issue of homosexuality to a phony Mixed Martial Arts event where Brüno appears in camoflage drag as a man named “Straight Dave” and ends up making out with another man after goading him into the ring. Neither of these scenes, the major set pieces of the film, work as provocations to the audience, nor do they carry a single revelation about American attitudes toward homosexuality or race. They fall flat because they lack the crucial power of political analysis that made Borat tick. Instead, time and again, Brüno states the obvious to film audiences ripe and ready to laugh at the titular character and his sexual proclivities.
Brüno
Ultimately, it is the reality of homosexuality in America, never openly addressed in the film, that stands in the way of the film achieving its goals. Throughout the film, Cohen uses the hetero mythology of gay sex and a misapplied equation between homosexuality and sado-masochism to provoke everyday people and again and again, the overwhelming majority of them patiently tolerate his provocations. These results, from a clairvoyant who watches Brüno give a blow job to a supposed spirit to the three aforementioned hunters who refuse to rise to his baiting comments to a hotel staff who are more annoyed than nonplussed after finding Brüno in bed, chained in leather underwear to his assistant, prove less about our attitudes toward homosexuality than they do about the way in which we as a nation tolerate assholes.
Even when Cohen does his usual good job of giving his subjects the proper length of rope with which to hang themselves, say, in the case of a “gay conversion” minister who uses a conversation with Brüno to make sexist comments about the intolerability of women, the insights achieved underline Brüno’s own problematic behavior. This is the major flaw in the conception of Brüno’s character; Where Borat was a naive, unfailingly polite character on the surface, Brüno is a self-important television host who wants nothing more than to be famous. And while his actions mirror the superficial fumblings of celebrities across the culture, it only serves to remove Brüno another step further from the day-to-day life of the people he constantly tries to humiliate.
This is the film’s greatest mistake. When Brüno acts, each undertaking associates celebrity and gay identity, marking them both as self-involved and superficial, a sort of aristocratic folly that exists outside the experience (and concern) of our culture at large. The most surprising moments in the film are not dangerous exposures of our cultural taboos, but the surprising tolerance of the American people when confronted by egotistical nonsense. What does that say about the film’s stance toward homosexuality? Time and again, I have read reviews laughing at the film and taking it in stride, which proves how ineffective the movie is in making any cogent points about one of the most important civil rights issues of our time. If this movie worked as it should, there would certainly be discussion of the film’s politics. Instead, everyone is discussing the relative merits of its jokes.
Sure, the film traffics in otherwise offensive stereotypes and hetero discomfort with gay sexual tropes in order to score some cheap laughs (sodomy via slingshot, exercise bike with dildo attached, etc), but here again, Brüno fails because the offense in question is a false construct. Most of the film’s supposed “outrage” is desperately manufactured by the film’s editing (reaction shots, cut aways to mortified bystanders, etc) and fails to materialize in audiences. Is there anyone who wouldn’t be upset to see a child in a cardboard box come off of a luggage carousel? But it is the cheap approach to gay sex that disappoints; what is most disturbing about homophobia in America is the casual, institutional comfort and cultural protections afforded to those expressing discriminatory, homophobic opinions. Unfortunately, Brüno provides few insights and little to no access into that world, into the language and behavior of heterosexual hypocrisy. Instead, the film deals in its own prejudicial understanding of the culture and builds its own universe of meaningless, superfical insights into what is otherwise a very real, very meaningful problem, a problem that is also ripe with real, groundbreaking comedic possibilities. We deserved better.
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