As Borat Sagdiyev, a visitor from Kazakhstan, Sacha Baron Cohen is a balls-out comic revolutionary, right up there with Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Cartman at exposing the ignorant, racist, misogynist, gay-bashing, Jew-hating, gun-loving, warmongering heart of America.
Subtitled “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”, Borat was a product of the cult spawned when HBO premiered Cohen’s Da Ali G Show in 2003, and Americans first encountered the inspired British comic who hid behind a series of alter egos.
His gangsta journalist Ali G tricked politicians (Newt Gingrich, Boutros Boutros-Ghali) and pundits (Gore Vidal, Andy Rooney) into embarrassing and revealing interviews. His Bruno, a gay fashion commentator with a Nazi fetish, claimed to be the voice of Austrian youth.
And then there’s Borat, the smiling, shamelessly offensive TV reporter from Kazakhstan who takes pride that his sister is “the number-four prostitute in all of country’ where a ritual – ‘the running of the Jew’ – is celebrated every year (“There you go, kids, crush that Jew egg before it hatches”).
Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world, but Cohen is counting on most Americans knowing squat about it or him. For the record, Cohen, 35, is nothing like Borat, Bruno, Ali G or Jean Girard, the gay French Formula One driver who kissed Will Ferrell full on the lips in Talladega Nights.
Cohen is a Cambridge scholar from a middle-class and devout Jewish family. Their son, the second of three, wrote his history thesis on the role of Jews in the American civil-rights movement. Not since Little Red Riding Hood have the unsuspecting been duped so hilariously by a big, bad wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Borat is such a mind-blowing comedy classic in the making (seeing it once is just not enough). Cohen’s cover was blown after the movie opened, but by then, plenty of people had lined up, signed releases and bought the scam: that Borat, with his pubic patch of a moustache, his unwashed grey suit, his butchered English and his blatant bigotry, really was a roving Kazakh citizen doing a documentary on American culture.
The government of Kazakhstan was appalled at seeing its country depicted as a place where men treat women as slaves, screw their sisters and swill wine made from horse piss. No wonder the Kazakh scenes were shot in Romania.
“Not too much rape – and humans only,” Borat helpfully tells a friend as he leaves his village for America, carrying “a vial of gypsy tears to prevent AIDS.”
Cohen makes primo slapstick out of all the silliness, but it’s his merciless knack for Swiftian satire that gives Borat its remarkable staying power. There’s something cathartic about laughs that stick in your throat.
Don’t be fooled by how this demonically devious mockumentary looks (as wonderfully tacky as an S18 million budget will allow) or how it’s organised (clever masked as haphazard), the film doesn’t waste one of its eighty-nine minutes.
The script Cohen wrote with Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, and Dan Mazer reveals that Borat has a hidden agenda for coming to America.
He’s seen Baywatch and wants to take the “virgin” Pamela Anderson as his bride. When Borat catches his fat producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian) jerking off to photos of Pam, he engages the hairy beast in a naked ass-to-mouth wrestling match that could set back screen nudity for decades.
If you don’t upchuck, the scene is uproarious and kicks off Borat’s journey across America in an ice cream truck (don’t ask) to find his muse.
Will Borat get his “sexytime” with Pam and have his hoped-for “romantic explosion” on her stomach? It doesn’t really matter because the core of this movie – its raison détre – is who and what Borat encounters along the way.
No aspect of prejudice, hypocrisy, arrogance and stupidity is overlooked.
At a rodeo in Virginia, Borat is greeted with cheers when he tells the crowd, “We support your war of terror,” and then hypes them up more by longing for the day that “Premier George W. Bush will drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.”
At a gun store, he asks the owner for the best gun for killing Jews and is told that a 9mm or a .45 will do just fine.
He settles for a live bear called Oxana.
Terrified at having to sleep overnight at the home of a kindly Jewish couple, Borat believes that two cockroaches crawling under the door are the Jews transformed. To make them go away, he throws money at them.
And so it goes with Borat’s antics extending to a frat-boy boozefest, a Pentecostal church rally, a classy dinner party down South in which he is taught the formal art of toilet training and a confab with feminists from Veteran Feminists of America (VFA) who seem startled by the well-known fact in Kazakhstan that the brain of a woman is the size of a squirrel’s.
On the debit side, the attempt to snatch Anderson at a book signing feels staged, as if the movie had suffered a brush with Hollywood. But the brush is quick and far from fatal. Cohen’s total immersion in his character is a wonder to behold.
The police were called on Sacha Baron Cohen ninety-two times during the production of the film. High-five!
A sequel – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm – was released in 2020.
Borat Sagdiyev
Sacha Baron Cohen Azamat Bagatov
Ken Davitian Luenell
Luenell Pamela Anderson
Herself Bob Barr
Himself Alan Keyes
Himself Oxanna the Bear
Charlie
Chester
Director
Todd Phillips
Larry Charles
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His gangsta journalist Ali G tricked politicians (Newt Gingrich, Boutros Boutros-Ghali) and pundits (Gore Vidal, Andy Rooney) into embarrassing and revealing interviews. His Bruno, a gay fashion commentator with a Nazi fetish, claimed to be the voice of Austrian youth.
Borat is such a mind-blowing comedy classic in the making (seeing it once is just not enough). Cohen’s cover was blown after the movie opened, but by then, plenty of people had lined up, signed releases and bought the scam: that Borat, with his pubic patch of a moustache, his unwashed grey suit, his butchered English and his blatant bigotry, really was a roving Kazakh citizen doing a documentary on American culture.
Don’t be fooled by how this demonically devious mockumentary looks (as wonderfully tacky as an S18 million budget will allow) or how it’s organised (clever masked as haphazard), the film doesn’t waste one of its eighty-nine minutes.
And so it goes with Borat’s antics extending to a frat-boy boozefest, a Pentecostal church rally, a classy dinner party down South in which he is taught the formal art of toilet training and a confab with feminists from Veteran Feminists of America (VFA) who seem startled by the well-known fact in Kazakhstan that the brain of a woman is the size of a squirrel’s.
