The Ambassador
Denmark's Borat takes on straw diplomats and blood diamonds.
DIRECTED BY MADS BRÜGGER
For his previous film, The Red Chapel, Danish journalist and stunt comic Mads Brügger smuggled himself into North Korea in the guise of a vaudeville troupe leader happy to make state-sponsored propaganda. In The Ambassador, the decoy isn’t the director himself, but rather a suitcase full of blood diamonds sought by the diplomats and financiers Brügger coaxes into revealing their true colours during some monstrous hidden-camera chats.
Denmark’s own Sacha Baron Cohen poses this time as Mr. Cortzen, a Liberian diplomat to the Central African Republic—a landlocked country crassly described by a white mercenary who doesn’t know he’s on film as a “savings bank” for France. For a cool $135,000, Brügger snags a diplomatic passport—an honorary M.B.A. and driver’s license are thrown in for free—that grants him meetings with the shadiest international businessmen and politicians in the C.A.R., many of them covetous white guys in ugly suits who view him as a kindred spirit.
Brügger’s portrayal of himself as an old-world shark heading for new waters is inspired (“Europe has become old and tired,” Cortzen protests wearily, pipe in hand) and there’s a certain perverse kick in seeing how his diplomatic cover allows those around him to behave in rotten, exploitative ways. But that thrill often comes at the expense of Brügger’s more unwitting collaborators, who don’t deserve such savage treatment.
Brügger’s insistence, in apologetic voiceover, that giving false hope is simply “a part of the game” hardly justifies his hollow promise to grant his Pygmy aids plum spots in the match factory he’s ostensibly opening as a cover for the operation. Someone always gets hurt in these satirical stunts, and it’s unfortunate that in this case the victims were the weakest players.