Borat
dir. Larry Charles
Twentieth Century Fox

The true subject, subtext and M.O. of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is as old as civilization itself: barabarism. It may be that the binary structures of cognition and identity make barbarism essential to civilization; there must be a "them" for there to be an "us." For any people with diverse tastes and competing interests to coalesce into a nation, there must be somewhere, preferably at some unverifiable remove, a Bizarro world of beings so bereft of the wisdom, knowledge, culture and principles that uplift us as to be subhuman, backwards unto bestiality. Barbarians speak a primitive, impenetrable language (indeed, we get "barbarian" from ancient Greece as a term of onomatopoetic condescension; the Golden-Agers thought foreigners' speech sounded like the bar-bar-barking of dogs). They eat disgusting foods, eschew hygienic custom, and, most importantly, violate sexual taboos with unabashed enthusiasm. In his mockumentary of Borat's coming to America, Sasha Baron Cohen instantiates all the barbarianism he can muster, with outrageously mixed results.

Cohen — in case you've somehow missed the hugely successful publicity campaign that propelled this odd film to boffo box office — is the British, Cambridge-educated comedian responsible for "Da Ali G Show," from which the Borat character was spun off. It's tempting to claim that his years on the River Cam put Borat in the tradition of fellow Footlights funnypersons Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry — but no. We're not talking George Bernard Shaw here. Cohen's Ali G persona is a bling-laden gangsta wannabe who, under a cover story about a rap-culture celebrity with a large "youth audience," accomplishes the ambush interview of public figures with paradoxical aplomb, peppering his straitlaced victims with malapropisms ("My man! Norman Chomsky!") and wildly inappropriate, even transgressive questions ("Wouldn't whale feces have to be like really, really, really large?"). Among those taken in were Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Newt Gingrich, Sam Donaldson, Christine Todd Whitman (whom he asked about the whales) and many, many more.

He uses a similar cover for a very different character: "Borat Sagdiyev," a Kazakh television reporter, looks rather like Groucho Marx's grandson, even borrowing the odd walk. Borat opens in his fictional hometown (actually in Romania), and gleefully establishes it as a cesspool of ignorance, venality, racism, misogyny and perversion — his sister shows her trophy for prostitution, we see the annual "Running of the Jew," etc. Borat explains that he's going to America to make a government-sponsored documentary; the townspeople give him a hero's sendoff and, after a fond valediction to the "town rapist," away he goes. Starting in New York, Borat and his hugely obese producer Azamat (gamely played by Ken Davitian) blunder around (not-quite-innocents abroad) misunderstanding and offending all they see and communicating in a subtitled "Kazakh" — actually a mishmash of at least Hebrew, Polish and Turkish. Through the hotel television Borat soon becomes infatuated with "Baywatch" babe Pamela Anderson, and so, against government orders. decides to strike out across America in quest for her heart. Now the real voyage of discovery, and the real atrocities, can begin.

Borat and Azamat take the low road across America, along the way staging some Ali G-style interviews, and exploring various facets of American culture — a bed and breakfast, a yard sale, an antique store, a gun shop, a rodeo, a Gay Pride Parade and more. Borat takes etiquette lessons and tries them out on a stuffy dinner party in Deep Dixieland — with predictably disastrous results. Borat and his producer split up, in cinema's all-time ugliest fight scene, when Azamat besmirches beloved Pamela's virtue, or at least that of her glossy fan photo. The reporter soldiers on ….

The absurd story, the quest, is of course just a pretext to connect various bits of Cohen's shtick, including fearless physical comedy, scripted skits, and improvised and ad-libbed comic bits. It all gets thrown together into a nearly seamless mockumentary which deliberately blurs the distinction between scripted bits and "reality." It's clear sometimes that Cohen is punking the unsuspecting (as when he sings the Kazakh national anthem at the rodeo), and it's also clear that some bits must have been staged cooperatively (an odd vignette with children and a live bear), but in most scenes one can't tell who is in on the joke — did they really run naked through business convention dinner? Many critics seem to have assumed that almost everything is caught Candid Camera style, but they're just getting caught up in the production's truthiness (as exposed by some intrepid reporters). Cohen here exploits the way that many narratives (like Penthouse letters, urban legends and Darwin Award stories) become more compelling when they have a veneer of authenticity. That's why the jokes' butt has to be a Pollack (or some barbarian ethnicity); "simpleton" would be too bloodlessly generic. It's why too, Borat has to be from a specific, real place, though his Kazakhstan has no more to do with that nation than Gilliam's Brazil did with Amazonia.

One thing is made clear by Cohen's brand of Socratic irony. He demonstrates, like a Stanley Milgram run amok, that many people will acquiesce to almost anything when one wears the mantle of media authority. (Perhaps much of this gimmick's appeal is the viewer's self-flattering assumption that he or she would not be thus taken in.) Not everyone finds this amusing, though most of the scribbling set seems to. Indeed Borat has been in a way badly served by its hyperventilating reviews ("Scathingly funny!" "Hilariously Shocking!"), for the quickest way to deflate a gag is to introduce it as especially great. There are definitely some laughs in the film, but it's really not even the funniest film this year (Little Miss Sunshine takes that honor).

Where Borat does especially distinguish itself is in the refreshingly acidic view it presents of Americans. With a very few exceptions they come off as buffoons, bigots and worse. The sentiments elicited by Borat's presence are often grotesque and, perhaps not coincidentally, Bush-love seems to course in the veins of most of the victims, unspoken but radiating off them like heat from a coal stove. Among the most appalling scenes is the Pentecostal meeting, where an actual Congressman and state chief justice prate about America, the "Christian nation," where the frenzied faithful speak in tongues (like Justice Clarence Thomas). But perhaps the worst is an RV cruise with frat boys on spring break. The views espoused by these drunken louts are racist and sexist to a sociopathic degree. Cohen, who reportedly wrote his thesis at Cambridge on Jewish activism in America's civil rights battle of the 1960s, and who, rather surprisingly, claims to be devout in his own faith, may be after just this sort of satirical indictment of the world's sole absolute power. Or he may just be after some really, really, really nervous laughs. In any case, he's left the cesspool of an imaginary home to reprove Eliot's observation, that "the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started."

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)