Bruno
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
35 Shots of Rum
Soul Power

Should we ever expect satire to be well-behaved? Lampoonery, properly energised, will charge in all directions once unmuzzled. However well-trained in targeting knaves or nincompoops, it will probably attack goodhearted innocents along the way.

Borat drew blood from several harmless citizens when not zeroing in on its main targets: the xenophobes, the lunatic leftists and rightists, the religious blowhards. Sacha Baron Cohen dons another wig this time – flowing chestnut with highlights – to play another provocateur abroad, the gay title hero of Brüno. He also dons a wardrobe fit to scare the Central Park horses: mini hotpants, midriff-revealing blouses, S&M gear when occasion requires.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno is simultaneously appalling and funny

Cohen’s new one-star show is appalling and funny and sometimes both simultaneously. His latest alter-ego is a supposed ex-Viennese television star, host of Funkyzeit mit Brüno, who sashays through the States tripwiring, by accident or design, the unwary. Real-life victims include the luckless 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul, cornered in a pre-interview bedroom by a seduction-minded hero before storming incandescently through the exit door, as well as the diehard homophobes set up for shaming. Paul deserved better: his scene seems redundant and a little flesh-creeping. Most other victims in Brüno merit what they get.

At best the film is not just good comedy, it is dedicated and illuminating social observation. You have to applaud, or at least admire, the comedian’s missionary nerve, when Cohen/Brüno joins three redneck hunters for a night of bear tracking and a campfire group-shot shows his companions pierced to the quick of their machismo – they try to gaze everywhere but at Brüno or the camera – when their supposed fellow meathead starts to ramp up his gay talk.

Later in the film there is the astonishing spectacle of collective hatred, howling and untamed, at a “Straight Pride” rally. The sea of bigots surrounding the high-meshed wrestling ring in the centre of the stadium are unprepared for the moment when Brüno sloughs his disguise beard and fighter’s gown and turns a slug-out with a prearranged stooge from the audience into a slow crescendo of striptease and love-in. Helplessly, the barrackers – some seen to be weeping with rage – try to bombard them. But only a few impotent bottles and chairs arc over the lofty fence.

Some commentators have called “Brüno” himself an anti-gay caricature. But Cohen could never have stalked these people without impersonating the shibboleth that shakes their world. That he does so hilariously is a bonus. And that there are a few soft targets along the way is forgivable. What killjoy would scissor the scenes of the anal bleaching salon, the judo instructor advising on defence against dildo-wielding assailants, or the unsuspecting marriage pastor thunderstruck when Brüno’s “bride” arrives sporting a moustache and accompanied by a small black child? “When did you have this child?” asks the priest; then, with a shrug of despair that is comically perfect because it is completely undesigned, “I don’t even know why I asked that question . . . ”

In The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, written and directed by Rebecca Miller, the cup runneth over. How many crises can an author pour into a character before we, or she, cry, “When!” Robin Wright Penn suffers from a trophy marriage, an obsession with her past – the devil makes flashbacks for idling minds – and bouts of binge somnambulism. As the wife of aged celebrity publisher Alan Arkin, she sneaks about their up-state mansion at night. (Could she even be the chocolate cake thief she accuses others of being? ...)

Miller, brought up in the haunted mansions of dramatist father Arthur, has every right to be a multiple split personality. Instead – self-therapy or sublimation – she turns her main characters into living identity conflicts. Pippa Lee is better than the whimsically diffuse Ballad of Jack and Rose. The heroine seems pluralised not just by her own multiple selves but also by a starry female cast (Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci, Maria Bello) who all, rather cleverly, project different aspects of the protagonist.

It is a mild relief when Keanu Reeves brings testosterone supplies, playing a passing hunk who gives Pippa the simple ardours she yearns for. Even so, this is a brittle, sometimes funny study in fragmentation. The film is so obsessed with the virtues of guiltlessness – as Pippa tries to absolve herself of everything from a gold-digging marriage to a mother’s death – that it is all, Miller makes clear, about guilt and its stubborn sticking power. The filmmaker is also clever enough to know the exact moments when to puncture the portentous, as in one character’s response to another’s attempted suicide: “Killing yourself with a disposable razor. I don’t think anyone’s done that before.”

Older man loves younger woman: it is the world’s oldest plot, starting with Adam and Eve. In the French film 35 Shots of Rum the January/May relationship is between a father and daughter. It is quite decent but very close, a ménage à deux between a train driver (Alex Descas) and his twentyish offspring (Mati Diop), inspired by filmmaker Claire Denis’s own memories of living with her single dad.

When a boyfriend creeps in – this story’s Keanu – he is played by Denis regular Grégoire Colin (Beau Travail). Colin breaks the enchanted mini-circle with his brusque exorcisms. Even his own pets get the treatment: a deceased cat is briefly mourned and then briskly bunged in a black bag, its “things” thrown in after. Denis is magisterial when dealing with her central trio, a kind of Isolde/Tristan/King Mark stuck in a dour promontory of French finitude. She is less magisterial when breaking the story’s circle herself and shifting, albeit briefly, to Germany, where Ingrid Caven (ex-Fassbinder diva) turns kitchen-sink realism to kitsch and surrealism Europudding-style. Credits reveal that the film had German co-funding. Sometimes money talks and the language is Gobbledegook.

The great, the good and the gaga gather in Soul Power. The place is Kinshasa, the time 1974. Few now remember the legendary music festival Zaire ’74, since it served as backdrop to the even more legendary “Rumble in the Jungle”, starring  M. Ali and G. Foreman. This documentary, staggering into town 35 years on, resembles a lost amnesiac returning to view and to sudden, voluble recollection.

Famous Afro-Americans (James Brown, B.B. King) and a few famous Africans (Miriam Makeba) storm out their rhythm-and-blues numbers in the climactic reels, while earlier scenes are devoted to the pre-concert hype, some stitched-together tension around the slowly rising gig platform – if we build it, will they come? – and bits of Ali motormouth footage left over from When We Were Kings. Actually, this whole film was made from WWWK leftovers, we learn. But we manage to forget that detail whenever the music soars.