Any movie that lists someone with the job of feces provider in the end credits is either going to be a disaster or one of the funniest, most outrageous films of the year. Boratis clearly the later, 82-minutes of the uber-outre antics of Sacha Baron Cohen’s hapless, casually racist, sexist, and faux Kazakhstani TV reporter alter-ego as he road-trips across America in an odyssey of bears, rubber fists, chocolate faces, and naked Greco-Roman wrestling.
Cohen’s character Borat Sagdiyev debuted on his hit cable show Da Ali G Show a few years back now. But what was then an amusing recurring sketch involving a Kazakh journalist completely, unashamedly ignorant of American ettiquette “unintentionally” making real interview subjects — politicians, church and community leaders — who are not in on the joke squirm, has been energized by the longer format, narrative structure, and larger budget of becoming a feature film.
Borat has come to New York to film a documentary about the U.S. (the film’s comically long subtitle is Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan), and after a romp with a few friendly guys from the gay pride parade who he mistook for folks who understood him culturally until one of them tried to put a rubber fist up his butt and other misadventures in the big city, Borat discovers Pamela Anderson on a rerun of Baywatch and heads off to California to woo her.
He and his rotund producer (Ken Davitian) buy a junker ice cream truck and sputter off into the American heartland, stopping for interviews for his documentary along the way. He interviews Alan Keyes in Washington D.C. and calls him a “genuine chocolate face.” He tries to buy a gun for killing Jews and only gets turned down because he isn’t American (Cohen himself, meanwhile, is Jewish in real life). He goes to a dinner party in the South and the hostess instructs him in the ways of wiping himself instead of bringing a clear plastic bag of his poo to the table. He kisses men socially but rails against gays. He jokes about retarded brother raping his taunting sister, leads a rodeo crowd in a cheer about killing every living thing in Iraq, and eventually prepares his wedding sack for Pam (using it gets him tackled by a team of store security guards). In short, he turns every American sensitivity and cultural stereotype on its head, leaving a trail of scandalized, mortally offended citizens in his wake and four beery frat boy types and one portly prostitute with warm memories.
Hundreds of hardened press and industry types cracked up hysterically, many while simultaneously cringing with their hands half covering their eyes at the first full Toronto International Film Festival screening. The woman next to me was crying with laughter. When was the last time you walked out of the theater physically worn out from both laughing and being continually surprised by the lengths the filmmakers went to to shock you? This is one of those films. When you clobber an audience with the image of dozens of treat-hungry kiddies encountering a ferocious bear in the window of the ice cream truck they’ve swarmed on one hand, and a naked, face-to-testes, brawl between Borat and his fat, hairy producer that spills out into the lobby of their hotel on the other, it’s hard not to be wrung out with the bawdy humor of it all. Borat is, in many ways, an heir to the same kind of subversion of American norms that the transvestite Divine perfected in John Waters’ early films by literally eating shit and keeping her mother in a crib. Apparently, though, in the America of 2006, a foreigner can be just as much of an outsider as a drag queen was in 1971.
— Jessica Letkemann
Sacha Baron Cohen, in his guise as Borat, being photographed at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. Photo by Jennifer Cooper.
