Boratism Lives!

Rating: 8/10 (20 December 2006)

"Borat" is a film like no other. It is essentially a spoof documentary about a television producer from Kazakhstan making a documentary about America. What little plot there is deals with Borat's journey across America in search of Pamela Anderson, with whom he has fallen in love after watching an old episode of "Baywatch", and whom he hopes to marry.
Borat is a creation of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen- I presume he always uses his middle name to avoid being taken for a female American ice skater- who uses Borat, an outsider, to voice opinions that would be unacceptable in modern Western society. This is not a film for the politically correct. (Neither is it a film for those who dislike scatological humour). Borat is a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, whose view of women is that they have brains the size of a squirrel's and were placed on Earth solely for men's sexual pleasure. This includes his sister whom he proudly describes as "number four prostitute in Kazakhstan". He is an even more confirmed racist with an obsessive hatred of Jews. Other targets of his scorn include blacks, gays, "retards", gypsies and (for some reason) Uzbeks. In the course of his journey he meets various representatives of American society- a feminist group, a Jewish couple who run a bed-and-breakfast establishment, a "fine dining" society, a comedian, a consultant on etiquette, a driving instructor, a fundamentalist preacher, a rodeo organiser, a group of college students- and either tries to shock them with his views or to tempt them into agreeing with them.
The first thing to be said about the film is that it is extremely funny. Sometimes the humour was not to my taste (like the extended wrestling match between two naked men), but most scenes - the one in the Jewish bed-and-breakfast, the dinner party, Borat's encounters with the black youngsters and the gay pride marchers, his rivalry with his neighbour Nushuktan Tulyiagby, the rodeo, his ill-fated attempt to woo Pamela- had me (and my wife) laughing out loud. There are also some great one-liners. ("You telling me the man who try to put a rubber fist in my anus was a homosexual?")
Some Kazakhs have taken exception to the use made of the name of their country, it is clear that Borat's Kazakhstan has virtually no connection with the actual state of that name in Central Asia. Cohen probably chose Kazakhstan as Borat's homeland because it is a country of which the great majority of Westerners will have no mental image. In Britain we have our preconceived ideas about the Americans, the French, the Germans and a couple of dozen other nationalities- not just crude racist stereotypes but also more subtle assumptions about national character, behaviour, diet, costume and so on. Most British people (even if they have heard of Kazakhstan) will have no such preconceived picture of the Kazakhs.
The film has aroused a lot of controversy; some people appear to have assumed that Cohen shares Borat's opinions and that this is a propaganda film made in aid of some ultra-reactionary ideology. Such objections, of course, miss the fundamental point of this film. It is often the fate of satirists to be assumed to be espousing the views they are satirising. Cohen is himself Jewish and made the film in order to expose anti-Semitism and other prejudices in modern society. If you found yourself agreeing with Borat, the joke is on you.
While Borat is unable to find any Americans who share his views on Uzbekistan, other forms of bigotry seem, on the evidence of this film, to be flourishing.( For example, he is able to get the rodeo crowd cheering with a bloodthirsty speech calling for the total destruction of Iraq, even down to the lizards). Although there has been a lot of debate about which scenes involved genuine members of the public and which were scripted, it is clear that Cohen's intention was not to celebrate prejudice but to satirise it- and not just to satirise it in America. Borat's views on Jews might seem horrendous, but they are only an exaggerated version of anti-Semitic sentiments which still persist in many places In the West the expression of such opinions has, since 1945, been taboo, but in other parts of the world venomous anti-Jewish hatred can be quite openly expressed. Cohen will no doubt appreciate the irony that while his film was still in the cinemas the Iranian Government- with the full approval of the President of that country- hosted an international conference of Nazi apologists, Holocaust deniers and anti-Jewish bigots. Boratism lives! 8/10