Poor Mexico! As if it didn't have enough problems with drug-related violence, the swine flu epidemic and the recession. Now comes Brüno.

I saw the movie a few nights ago and left shaking my head, not knowing very well whether I had just seen a repugnant racist diatribe, or something that shouldn't be considered more than a funny movie.

Its main character, an Austrian gay-model-turned-TV-reporter played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, makes fun of almost everybody, but is particularly brutal to Mexicans. In his fictional TV talk show, Brüno invites his celebrity guests to sit on top of live men on their fours looking at the floor with a mixture of boredom and resignation. The men resemble the stereotype of Mexican laborers, mustaches included.

"Come and sit on our great furniture,'' Brüno tells one of his show's guests, pop singer Paula Abdul. "These are our Mexican chair people. Demi Moore has two of them in her house.''

The movie theater burst into laughter. Part of me joined in the laughter, and another part of me said this is not funny.

Most Mexicans are not amused.

"Mexico's image abroad has never been worse in recent memory,'' former Mexican government spokesman Jose Carreño Carlón wrote Wednesday in the daily El Universal. "You don't see any more proud, romantic nor witty Mexicans in stereotypes abroad. You can't find the image of a modernizing Mexico . . . only images of broken Mexicans, willing to be used as things.''

According to Mexican government figures, the H1N1 epidemic alone will cost the country about $4 billion in lost tourism and export income this year. Mexico has launched a $100 million ad campaign abroad to boost its ailing tourism industry.

MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

Curious about how Mexico will respond, I called the other Brüno -- Bruno Ferrari, the head of Pro-Mexico, the Mexican government agency in charge of revamping the country's image abroad.

Ferrari told me the movie is not playing in Mexico yet and that he hasn't seen it, but he has mixed feelings about how the government should react to his namesake film character.

On the one hand, anything that goes against people's dignity, regardless of what nationality we are talking about, is demeaning and should be denounced as racist.

On the other hand, talking about the movie will only help bring more attention to it, he said.

"We will have to do a profound analysis to see how to react to this,'' said Ferrari, whose agency is scheduled to launch an ambitions country branding campaign abroad over the next two months.

Simon Anholt, the British country brand expert who publishes the annual Anholt-Gfk Roper Nation Brads Index, a survey that asks more than 20,000 people around the world how they perceive other countries, told me that he doesn't believe the movie will make a big dent on Mexico's image abroad.

"The overall image of a country doesn't change very much by something like this,'' Anholt said. "Even events like swine flu don't destroy countries' images. If Mexico had infectious diseases for 20 years, that would affect the image of Mexico. But these things happen all the time, and people understand. Avian flu didn't destroy the image of the Asia Pacific.''

As to how Mexico should react to the movie, Anholt said, "There is only one response to comedy, and that's to laugh. This is a comic film: You either ignore it or you laugh.''

He added, ``If you respond seriously, then you become the object of the joke. This is what happened to [Sacha Baron Cohen's previous movie] Borat and Kazakhstan. They (Kazakhs) behaved exactly like their own caricature: They said this is an insult to the glorious nation-state of Kazakhstan. They should have said, 'This is a pretty funny movie. By the way, you should visit Kazakhstan.' ''

AN OPPORTUNITY SEEN

My opinion: I agree. Mexico should laugh along. It should consider producing park benches looking like Sacha Baron Cohen on all fours and inviting tourists to sit on them.

It could use the ensuing world attention to divert attention from drug-cartel violence and the H1N1 disease, and to portray itself as a spectacular country that is fun to visit, which -- despite its current problems -- it still is.

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