How can we be that regressive?

Rating: 6/10 (25 June 2009)

Borat rhymes with two things : boring forward and gore backward. To turn anything hateful and disgusting into some kind of humorous item from the big trick store round the corner is not easy, but is it funny? What's more I had already seen many of these gagging choking gags in other films, like drinking from the toilet bowl, bringing your feces in a plastic bag to the dinner table for disposal, inviting a street lady to a dinner party in a middle class home, and so many others. In fact Schwarzenegger is more effective in that line of the cultural gap or shock between the good old Soviet culture and the American lifestyle when he plays the KGB officer in New York running after a couple of Georgian Mafiosi in Red Heat if I remember well. It is amazing how they have, through advertising, made this film into what it is not, a funny film whereas it is sad and even very sad to see the thickness of disrespect they accumulate and pile up in order to produce a shocked little laugh. But one thing is sure. This film represent the spirit of its time, that end of an eight year tenure that was getting so stale and so full of carbon dioxide and poor in oxygen that we were dying like a poor fish thrown on the grassy bank of a dried up river. Even the bush of the rose garden were severely wilted and close to death from drought, the drought of the absence of basic honesty and truthful freedom of speech. But that does not save the film, that makes it an archaeological testimony of the lurking death in which we were drowning then.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID