On then, to the fakery issue. The scene in which Bruno, having got a job as a movie extra, plays a member of a jury in a courtroom drama but can’t keep his mouth shut … this is probably faked. And the leather-clad woman who whips Bruno at the end of a hetero swingers party, with cartoon whiplash-cracks pasted on to the sound track, is almost certainly acting, and her scene is staged. (The other swinger-couples are probably real and this leather-dominatrix was presumably the “girlfriend” with whom Bruno gained admission to the party.)
But the film’s most glorious scene is absolutely real. Bruno interviews Texas congressman and would-be US presidential candidate Ron Paul in his hotel suite, and then attempts to seduce him to create a sex tape that will kick-start his celebrity career. It is sublime. Baron Cohen’s nerve is incredible; Paul’s outrage and horror are unmistakably the real thing, and the mistaken-identity punch line is a classic. Did Baron Cohen and his writers, Dan Mazer, Pete Baynham, Anthony Hines and Jeff Schaffer, think of the punch line first and then sucker Paul into getting involved? Or did it occur to them later? Either way, it was inspired.
Famously, Ronald Reagan ordered the tune Edelweiss to be played when the Austrian president Rudolf Kirschlager visited the White House, believing it to be the Austrian national anthem. I suggest that the organizers of the Golden Globe ceremony start work now on a new funky arrangement of Edelweiss to play when Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of modern cinema’s most notorious faux-strian, sashays up to receive his award.
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