Sacha Baron Cohen tweaks the nipples of conservative America and bares his buffed, burnished butt at the religious right as his latest creation, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista called Brüno. But is he exposing the deep-seated homophobia in US society? Or demonstrating the perfectly reasonable resistance most people would feel when confronted by a screeching pillock in an assless unitard?

To argue the former, you would have to accept Brüno as representative of the gay community as a whole and that, tragically for the manufacturers of assless unitards, is just not the case. But while claims that the film is a social satire are as empty as Brüno’s pretty head, there’s no arguing with the fact that the film is staggeringly rude and very, very funny. The laughs build and build: it’s like surfing a tidal wave of hysterical bad taste.

Brüno shares with Borat a slightly patchy, sketch-based structure and a total fearlessness on the part of Baron Cohen. He incurs the wrath of everyone from rednecks at a cage fight to ultra- Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. But while Borat, for all his anti-Semitism and racism, had an endearingly clueless naivety, Brüno is vapid, mean-spirited and unlikeable, a fact that may harm the film’s commercial prospects — that and the harrowing anal bleaching scene.

18, 82mins

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