>>REVIEW
BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION KAZAKHSTAN
STARRING Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian and Pamela Anderson
DIRECTED BY Larry Charles
Opens Friday, November 3
Check listings
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is as brilliant (and ridiculous) a movie as its title suggests. Da Ali G Show creator Sacha Baron Cohen brings Kazakh TV journalist Borat Sagdiyev to America in all his offensive but well-meaning glory. While there, Borat’s assignment is to make a documentary of the country’s cultures and norms and take what he finds back to Kazakhstan. With Borat, Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles (a.k.a. the creator of Seinfeld and the man who changed the face of TV comedy) tread into the precarious waters of making a full-length feature film from what started out as brief comedy skits. But at a scant 82 minutes, the film merely whets the appetite for another dose of Borat’s delicious ridiculousness.
Borat is a movie that makes fun of everyone – Jews, Christians, blacks, whites, women and especially gypsies (whose tears he holds in a jar so he won’t catch AIDS), but the character still manages to be likable because he’s unaware there’s something wrong with these attitudes, living his life in a hyper-sensitive realm of pure naiveté.
The brilliance of Borat lies in the fact that, in playing his hilariously absurd character against straight-faced, uninformed interviewees, Baron Cohen often receives completely absurd responses. Borat’s comments would be extremely offensive, were it not for the fact that it’s plainly obvious Baron Cohen is satirically pulling back the curtain on anti-Semitic, misogynist, racist and homophobic attitudes still present in 2006.
At a high-society dinner at Magnolia Mansion in Birmingham, Borat’s lack of dinner etiquette leaves little to be desired – he insults the wives at the table, says bizarre things in true Borat style and even hands one of his dinner companions a bag filled with his own feces. These gestures garner shock from those at the table to be sure, but are generally met with some sort of talk on how things are done here in America. Apparently poop in a bag is OK, but inviting a black woman over for dessert is not, as Borat and his uninvited guest are promptly shown the door.
But I digress. Sure the satire in Baron Cohen’s film speaks to something larger, but the movie is just funny because, well, it just is. Case in point – the hairy-man-in-a-banana-hammock shtick has been done many a time before, but never like this. For lack of a name to describe Borat’s fluorescent green swimsuit, let’s just say that the sight of him with this bizarre piece of fabric cradling his nether regions will make whatever’s in your mouth come out your nose. |
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