Satire, but who's the target?

Rating: 3/10 (20 April 2009)

There are odd lines in 'Borat: Make Cultural Learnings of America for benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan', to give the film its full and deliberately preposterous title, that really made me smile; for example, when Borat's producer dresses up as Oliver Hardy, Borat comments "I had not come to America to fight with a man disguised as Adolf Hitler". But overall, I struggled to understand this film. The character of Borat, invented and played by comedian Sacha Baron-Chen, is a central Asian man of wildly exaggerated naiveté and crudity, who in this movie makes a voyage of discovery to the U.S.A. The film is clearly a satire of sorts, but who is the target? Certainly not Kazakhstan, for the Kazakhstan, as it appears in this movie, is a generic shorthand for underdevelopment and backwardness. So is it America who Baron-Cohen is satirising, exposing its true nature through juxtapositioning it with the ridiculous? But this interpretation doesn't quite work either, The Borat character is simply too outlandish to provide much insight into the real America; most of the people Borat interacts with awkwardly humour or ignore him, and even though the behaviour of some is revealingly bad, I just felt sorry for most of his victims. There's simply no rational way to respond to someone so dreadful, and that Baron-Cohen was able to find some ordinarily unpleasant people to mock somewhere in the United States is hardly so surprising. If indeed the film is showing us candid-camera style moments: this was the sort of comedy with which Baron-Cohen made his name, but one wonders how many of these scenes could have been filmed if they weren't in fact staged, in spite of the painfully believable dialogues. I loved Chris Morris's 'Brass Eye', a program with substantial candid sections, but which successfully mocked trends in modern current affairs programming, self-promoting celebrities unable to see through naked idiocy if presented with an opportunity for publicity, and ourselves for putting up with both of the above. But I spent most of this film just cringing, unable to ascertain who the joke was supposed to be on.