A couple of years ago, in 2006, the biggest comedy hit was a film called Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan.
The film grew out of a recurring character on a British television show, Da Ali G. Show, created by Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. I mention the man’s religion because the film attacks anti-Semitism in a brutally funny way, even as many dull-witted critics accuse the film of that bias. If so, then Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator was also anti-Semitic, and his Monsieur Verdoux was a defense of mass murder.
Cohen plays a Kazakh television reporter, Borat Sagdiyev, sent to America to make a documentary on American living for the benefit of his home nation. That’s the setup, which starts in Borat’s native village, and depicts his family and villagers as a bunch of creepy, incestuous morons who have an annual ‘Running Of The Jew’ festival, a la the bulls at Pamplona, Spain. Of course, this is not because the film is satirizing that ‘reality,’ but because it’s picking up and throwing the Western preconceptions of that country back in the faces of that audience, much the same way that the film Everything Is Illuminated portrayed the Russian natives that are presented as idiots in that film in ways to tweak the preconceptions those people and customs engender in the West. In keeping with that, the supposed Kazakh language and ‘national anthem’ are, naturally, gibberish and folly.
The 84 minute film is a mockumentary that is not subtle in anything it does (a la Spinal Tap, or the Christopher Guest films), and is certainly not a work of genius, any more than a Three Stooges short is. So why so many viewers and critics felt so negatively about the film, even as it broke box office records, shows that American stupidity is never to be underestimated, even though a similar ruckus ensued a few years earlier when the satiric TV cartoon South Park was made into a terrifically scalding movie.
After the setup, the film is a series of blackout sketches that take Borat (in character) as he basically does a Candid Camera routine in front of gullible Americans who believe he is a legitimate Russian reporter. He has run-ins with politicos like Alan Keyes and Bob Barr, the current Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, a gay pride parade, and a group of Feminazis. Cohen deliciously gets all to reveal their own darker and denser sides.
Article comments
1 - Jordan Richardson
One of my favourite comedies ever. Thanks for revisiting this.