Bursting the arrogant bubble!

Rating: 10/10 (2 July 2007)

This piece of filmatography can not even be called a movie, but it is definitely breaking grounds in more ways then one.
If you look at its surface it's a stupid attempt of making fun out of cultural differences, but if you look at it critically (which I'm afraid the vast majority of people - anywhere in the world - can not), you will get a very interesting profile of how a developed nation looks at a nation they believe to be undeveloped.
OK, they could have left the naked wrestling scene out, as it is nothing else then pointless and grouse, but the rest of the movie is playing on stereotypes, which generally really do apply.
The main point of the movie, which many fail to see, is the idea of American arrogance. Because the guy is from a foreign country, which once belonged to the Soviet Union and is still a poor country, not to mention that it is a country most people in US don't know anything about (except that it belongs to the less developed part of the world), they are prepared to believe just about anything. And here it the catch. Borat seems to be a complete idiot, but since he's from Kazahstan, the people he contacts with, find this to be perfectly natural (completely disregarding the fact that he is supposedly a journalist payed by their government to do a job - which would have to mean he is competent to do it and would need a quite high level of education to even get the job). This is the mirror this movie sets up for the US people - how they treat others, for whom they believe are poorer and less worth. And the higher a person is on the social scale, the less they think of the foreigner from an obscure country (they even believe he doesn't know how to use a toilet).
It is true, the film is showing this in a abusing way, especially to the country of Kazahstan, but more over it is a film, which criticizes the arrogant US superiority complex towards the rest of the world (one which I have experienced many times to be true).
The problem is, that people in US in general don't travel abroad all that much, yet they presume (even if they have no real grounds to presume that) that people abroad live a worse life and have less, thus they judge most of the nations outside the US based on the stereotypes they have at home (example: a German is a guy from an ex eastern Germany who was always oppressed by the communist regime and can't even have a radio or a TV, so every German would give a limb to be able to have an old B/W TV an American is selling at a yard sale). I know, it seems harsh, but unfortunately that's the picture many Americans have and that's the thing this movie was making fun of.