To the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, at the behest of a certain General Aladeen of Wadiya. As the invitation puts it: “His Excellency Admiral General Aladeen Would Like to Pleasure You at the World Premiere of The Dictator.” Perhaps it is this unusual promise which brought all these shiny orange people onto the red carpet on a dismal, rainy Thursday evening prior to watching the latest film from Sacha Baron Cohen. You would think their stylists would have warned them that tangerine doesn’t go with red, but here they are anyway, the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, illuminated still further in the sheet lightning from fifty photographers’ flashbulbs. No, strike that – the people behind me are saying it’s the cast of Geordie Shore. We’ll go with that. Thank you, people behind me.
Next is an abrasive wee fellow named Louis Spence. I don’t know who he is or what he’s done to warrant a place on the red carpet, but Alex Zane, the red-carpet interviewer with scissor legs, is mighty pleased to see him. What would Louis do if he were dictator of his own country? “Spit at people with speech impediments,” apparently. Oh dear. Is that an in-joke? Alex laughs, but it’s the fearful laughter of a man who sees his every media moment through the prism of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand scandal, wondering: “Who will be next? Could it be me?” Moving along, he interviews one of several comics currently named Russell (not Brand), who tells him that what makes Sacha Baron Cohen so brilliant is that “he finds the line and thrusts across it …He totally, schizophrenically inhabits who he becomes.”
Right on cue, here comes the film’s star as General Aladeen, arriving in front of the venue waving from the driver’s seat of an orange Lamborghini – a clamped orange Lamborghini, that is, mounted on the bed of a City of Westminster tow truck. I like his habit of only giving press interviews in character (see this email exchange with Dennis Lim of the New York Times). Even if you don’t find it funny (though personally I’m tickled by his in-character assertion that “The Arab Spring is just a silly fad, like ‘mood rings’ or ‘human rights’”), you have to concede that it’s preferable to celebrities talking about the spiritual journey which they embarked upon with their latest role. Imagine if everyone gave interviews in character. Wouldn’t that be something? Unless it was Jodie Foster in Nell, obviously. Clearly there would need to be exemptions.
Just after the lights go down, Baron Cohen appears — still in costume and in character — in a spotlight in the balcony, greeting the audience with cries of “Hello, hello, death to the West!” and “Hello, English devils”. He says he has been enjoying his red carpet experience. “Usually when I am on a red carpet it is because I have just beheaded someone in my living room.”
That’s the general tenor of the material in The Dictator, which has at its core the novel idea of an essentially innocent oppressor: a naïve, mollycoddled man who just happens to be a vicious murderer. It’s really the same joke that held together Baron Cohen’s last two films, Borat and Brüno — wide-eyed naïf comes to the US and exposes inadvertently that country’s hypocrisy and small-mindedness — but with the twist of making him a psychopath rather than merely a buffoon.
Watching The Dictator, which begins with the dedication “In Loving Memory of Kim Jong-Il”, I missed the genuinely dangerous edge of Borat and Brüno; those pictures placed Baron Cohen in volatile, real-life scenarios where his provocations almost led to violence against him. There’s no way to fake or replace it. On the other hand, that species of comedy can’t go on forever, not least because the actor is now a widely recognisable superstar, unlikely to be able to orchestrate pranks of the same scale. At least The Dictator is often wildly funny, particularly when General Aladeen, stripped of his uniform and beard, and wandering New York for reasons too convoluted to recount, has to take work in a Brooklyn feminist co-operative “for people of all or no genders” (as the store worker Zoe, played by the impish Anna Faris, puts it).
The film has teeth, which it bares occasionally. I’m not thinking so much of the bad taste gags—a terrorism Wii game, which offers Aladeen options such as “Tokyo Subway” and “London Underground” before he opts for “Munich Olympics,” drew a shocked gasp from the audience, while there’s a running gag involving a severed head, which was done better in the horror-comedy Re-Animator. But it succeeds in finding a rich vein of humour in post-9/11 paranoia. And it turns the tables on both liberalism (in its lively mockery of Zoe and her co-op pals) and the west, the latter skewered in an inspired monologue which has Aladeen showing how the US advocates at home the same cruelty it decries in foreign regimes.
“The Dictator” is released 16 May.
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