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dir. Larry Charles
84 mins., certificate 15
How best to describe Sasha Baron Cohen’s attitude to taboos in Borat? There are all kinds of words you might want to use, but the best would have to ‘thorough’. We have jokes about: blacks, gay men, women, incest, child abuse, poverty, Jews, Arabs, mental illness, physical handicap, Christianity, Islam, the USA, including its flag and anthem, foreigners, toilet issues, terrorism and as many varieties of sex as you can shake your stick at. Which still leaves lesbianism, the Chinese and Hinduism, but that’s slim pickings for a sequel.
Is it as funny as everyone says it is? I think it probably is. I saw it at a 400-seater screen, 393 people short of capacity, at midday - quite enough to kill a comedy - but the seven of us roared throughout. If I left the cinema with a slight sense of self-questioning, it wasn’t moral qualms: I was reassessing how big and clever I really was, to laugh so very long and so very loud at the sight of two naked men fighting.
The film is a mock documentary with the difference that it is also a true documentary. Sasha Baron Cohen, the British Jewish comedian best known until now as Ali G, masquerades as Borat, a Kazakhstani TV presenter, genial, guileless, culturally backward and full of every prejudice possible. He travels from New York to California with his producer, interviewing people, taking lessons and soaking up the USA. The basic joke is two-sided - Borat’s outrageous behaviour and cultural incongruity on the one side, and the responses of the real people he meets, on the other, from liberal squirming to redneck backslapping.
The result bears comparison with Britain’s other great comedy export, Ricky Gervais, whose comedy also revolves around the politically incorrect attitudes of a fictional character. There are those who feel that laughing at race, disability, etc. is wrong under any circumstances, and there are defenders who say that we are laughing at racism and ablism and what could be more wholesome than that? In both cases, I think the reality is a little more complicated.
With Gervais, the heart of his humour is neither laughing at race nor mocking racism, but enjoying how hung up and embarassed we are about these issues. In a similar way, this film is not at heart misogynistic, nor anti-misogynistic satire, but rather delights in confronting people with a misogynist from a foreign culture and seeing how they respond.
That said, in both cases there still seems to be an element of the comedian and his audience simply enjoying the fact that his role allows him to make jokes at the expense of traditional victims. On the other hand there is also a savage and perfectly just satire in Borat. Borat’s horrendous attitudes give his hosts enough rope to hang themselves - such as the rodeo crowd who whoop and holler at his desire to “drink the blood of every man, woman and child of Iraq”.
By the same token though, Cohen’s approach gives the angels a chance to shine too.
For all the genocidal cowboys, there are more who greet the Borat with welcoming tolerance while challenging his attitudes, like the driving instructor who patiently explains why pursuing women drivers for sex is not acceptable. If the film captures US self-indictment over attitudes to Iraq, it is equally a tribute to US friendliness and articulate liberalism.
Another impressive aspect of Cohen’s style is that, unlike Gervais’s, it takes him face to face with the people whom it risks offending - Harlem youth, Jewish B&B owners, feminists, cowboy patriots, Pentecostals. There is something admirably vulnerable and brave about that.
On the last of that list, it may trouble Christians when Borat not only vists a church but responds to an altar call and is filled with the Spirit. Blasphemy? Quite possibly. Taking a bedraggled visitor to the front of your church, hearing his pitiful story of being abandonned and helpless in a foreign country, and responding by manhandling him to the floor in the mighty name of Jesus and browbeating him into speaking into tongues - if that isn’t taking the name of the Lord in vain what is? That’s what I mean by enough rope to hang yourself.
Borat’s horrendous attitudes
give his hosts enough rope
to hang themselves
- such as the rodeo crowd who whoop and holler at his desire
to “drink the blood of every man,
woman and child of Iraq