Baron Cohen lampoons everything, with no exceptions...

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2015)

I can still remember very clearly the time "Borat" came out, mainly because everyone that I seemed to interact with was talking about. The posters were everywhere, it was in the news, the hype was enormous. Somehow it took me 8 years to see it, but for a film which is incredibly topical it still feels alarmingly relevant. It's crude and offensive, and yet extremely funny because of the situations that go on. Of course, Sacha Baron Cohen shines in the title role, lampooning everything he can with no exceptions.
For anyone that's been living under a rock for the past 8 years, Borat is a Kazakh journalist who goes around tricking people into doing or saying absurd things. We meet him in a rural town in Kazakhstan, where he is sent by the government to America in order to make a documentary about their culture. He goes with his producer, Azamat, with whom he has a sometimes rocky relationship, and they meet people from all walks of life. The character is inherently funny as a cultural stereotype who is stupid and offensive, but the real laughs in the film come from the reactions of other people. Because he is often so plausible, people will do or say things that they wouldn't on US television, and he baits his targets with ridiculous situations just to see how they'd react.
It's a film based less on plot and more on hilarious set-pieces, which become even funner because the reactions are genuine and unscripted. Borat releases chickens on the subway, sings made up words to the US national anthem at a rodeo, embarrasses himself at a a dining club, goes to a Pentecostal church meeting and has a naked fight with Azamat through a crowded hotel. The stunts are all hilarious, and made even more-so by the fact that they actually happened - it's really just a standard road movie, but accentuated by being real.
At the start of the film, you try to figure out who the film is satirising through its offence. It seems anti-Semitic or anti-Kazakhstan, but it soon becomes quite clear who the fools of the film are - the American people. Borat is there to exploit American stereotypes of nationalism, rednecks, conservatives and Christian crazies. Sure, he's a stereotype, but the fact that he's so often taken as genuine shows Americans as gullible and stupid. His choice is dangerous, however, since there are many who won't understand the depth of this lampooning, and instead think it's okay to be anti-Semitic etc. In this way, the film very occasionally crosses a line in terms of taste.
The film is just over 80 minutes long, and this feels like the perfect length for it. Any more and the jokes might become tiresome - there isn't really a proper plot to any of it, just a series of vignettes. Having finally experienced it, I can instantly tell why it was such a craze and has become so iconic - it's quotable, and nearly every scene makes you laugh. In this way, it's better than a vast number of scripted comedies these days. Shouldn't we be worried about this?