Sacha Baron Cohen Is Making A Movie About Cecil Chao, Who Offered $65 Million To Get A Man To Marry His Lesbian Daughter

From Deadline, this will be either amazing or terrible:

Sacha Baron Cohen and his Four By Two Films will develop a feature for Paramount Pictures inspired by Cecil Chao, the Hong Kong billionaire who offered $65 million to any man who succeeded in marrying his lesbian daughter. Chao’s offer made international headlines last week following reports that his daughter had a French church bless her relationship with her longtime girlfriend. The film’s tentatively titled The Lesbian, and is a potential starring vehicle for Baron Cohen, who presumably would play the billionaire. He’ll produce through his Four By Two Films banner. A writer has not been attached.

The key to a project like this will be to satire the homophobia, megalomania, and alienation from family Cecil Chao represents. The problem with Baron Cohen’s work is that, for every singalong to “Throw The Jew Down The Well,” he tends to elicit total decency from people: his sense of what constitutes exposing someone is not as well-calibrated as he thinks it is. In Hugo, he gave one of the better performances of his career as a rigid, wounded veteran of the Great War who inflicted his pain on other people and cut himself off from kindness, but that was when he was being directed by Martin Scorsese from a script by John Logan. Hopefully Baron Cohen has the good sense to get home help on this one. It’s a story that could cut deeply if done correctly. And it would be nice to have it land.