Candid Camera for the 21st Century

Rating: 8/10 (14 April 2007)

The pseudo-documentary "Borat" resembles nothing so much as a "Candid Camera" episode on crack. Like Allen Funt, the originator of the format, Sacha Baron Cohen - along with his co-writers, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer and director Larry Charles - generates laughs by tricking unsuspecting people into making complete and utter fools of themselves on camera. Only, in this case, Cohen ventures much further into the realms of vulgarity and crudeness than Funt could ever have imagined or the television censors of his time would ever have permitted.
As embodied by Cohen, Borat is a fictional character who hails from the very real West Asian country of Kazakhstan. Convinced that he can learn some valuable lessons from the West that he can then bring back and share with his own people, Borat says goodbye to his impoverished village and heads to the United States to experience first hand the accoutrements of American culture. The film chronicles the many absurd encounters he has with the folks he meets, mainly in Middle America, as he wends his way westward across the continent in search of his dream girl, Pamela Anderson.
Some of the "skits" the filmmakers have come up with are sidesplitting and hilarious, some merely amusing, and others downright offensive (and all the funnier for being offensive, I might add). The movie is least successful when it breaks away from the strict "Candid Camera" formula and shows us Borat on his own, out of sight of anyone not in on the joke, still carrying on the fiction. In other words, the more "scripted" the movie appears, the less authentic it feels. It should also be noted that there are times when one gets the impression that the people on whom the deception is being played are not quite as ignorant of the ruse as they appear to be, primarily because the placing of the camera often feels illogical if the spontaneity were truly real and genuine. The one element that made "Candid Camera" utterly believable was that it was careful to keep the camera completely hidden throughout the course of the bit. Here we wonder why it takes people so long to realize that they are indeed the target of a colossal joke (a prime example is when the old Jewish couple is walking up the stairs to bring food to the visiting Borat and the camera is filming them from OUTSIDE the room rather than sticking with Borat and his cohort within).
However, what gives the movie its gravitas and heft, and takes it far beyond the level of mere "Jackass"-type gimmickry is how Cohen manages to use his shtick to expose the bigotry and xenophobia that lie just beneath the surface of a certain segment of American society. Yet, one should also point out that quite a number of these people are actually more tolerant and indulgent of Borat's inane antics than one might except any reasonable person to be (or than we ourselves might be if we were put in a similar situation). Indeed, there's a certain cruelty to the film in that the individuals and groups he is mocking are actually treating him rather nicely at times. The audience is allowed to feel superior to the people on screen in a way that might not be entirely justified. "Candid Camera" always seemed innocent and harmless in its intentions; "Borat" definitely does not, which is both the strength and the weakness of the film.
Still, love him or loathe him, one cannot help but sit back and admire the sheer courage and chutzpah Cohen displays in placing himself in what are, in actuality, some pretty hairy situations. That he isn't ridden out of town on a rail, the outraged citizenry chasing close behind him with torches ablaze, is, perhaps, the most astonishing aspect of the movie. It's the bald-faced audacity with which Cohen throws himself into his work - rather than the quality of the individual sketches themselves - that ultimately makes "Borat" so much fun to watch.