Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Larry Charles (2006)
Seeing Borat after Brüno is bound to reduce the impact of this earlier mockumentary’s style. Borat is more strongly dislikeable, though. The well-rehearsed moral objections to it are reasonable. Sacha Baron Cohen’s meant-to-be irresistible title character is a sexual chauvinist, who loathes Jews and gipsies. He’s homophobic. He makes Kazakhstan a laughing stock. But my antipathy towards the film has more to do with Borat’s targets for derision on his cross-country travels in the US. I guess plenty of people enjoy Borat as an exposé of various types of American religious extremism (a United Pentecostal church gathering), barbarism (three pissed fraternity students), humourlessness (a trio of poker-faced feminists) and a combination of all three (a rodeo audience). As with Brüno, however, you seem to be witnessing, and are meant to laugh at, typical human responses, as much as at the reactions of the particular and particularly prejudiced types the protagonist takes a rise out of. On a New York street, he latches onto someone who runs away, Borat in pursuit; the panicked man looks ridiculous but how can you not sympathise with him? The owner of a Confederate heritage antique shop isn’t unreasonably angry when Borat demolishes a few hundred dollars worth of glassware and crockery. What seems more typically and distinctively American is how determinedly, durably affable a lot of people are – a driving instructor, a politician, a social etiquette coach, the elderly Jewish couple at whose B&B Borat and his sidekick Azamat (Ken Avitian) find themselves staying.
Larry Charles and Baron Cohen (who wrote the screenplay with his usual team of collaborators, Peter Baynham, Anthony Hines and Dan Mazer) sometimes struggle to achieve their effects. Borat, a TV personality in his homeland who’s supposedly in America to make a film for the moral edification of his compatriots, addresses the rodeo audience with a series of pro-War on Terror statements. The redneck applause becomes more muted as Borat’s remarks get more extremely right-wing. It’s only when he travesties ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ – accompanying the tune with what he claims is the lyric of the Kazakhstan national anthem – and the crowd start booing that the film-makers get what they want. The excesses of the fundamental Christian assembly are more startling when they’re being filmed in a purely documentary style – before Borat gets involved in the proceedings. He goes to a dinner party and the outrageous gaffes pile up, in spite of the tutorial he gets in advance from a dauntlessly sympathetic expert on fine dining manners. The culminating solecism has Borat return from his genteel Southern hostess’s rest room with his shit in a plastic bag: appalled but resilient, she takes him back to the toilet to explain the correct procedure. Then Borat’s ‘friend’ – an aging black prostitute called Luenell – arrives uninvited at the house and both of them are ejected. When she and Borat go back to her place at the end of the evening, her attitude towards him is relaxed, unfazed and affectionate. I took this woman to be the genuine article and found her reaction to Borat the most touching (and strongest) moment in the film. It comes as a real letdown at the end, when she returns to Kazakhstan as Borat’s new wife, to discover that Luenell is a professional actress/comedienne.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s ambivalence towards lampooning celebrity, which runs through Brüno, is evident here in the treatment of Pamela Anderson, whom Borat falls in love with after seeing Baywatch in his hotel room. Anderson seems to have been complicit in the sequence in which, at a book signing, Borat throws a Kazakh marriage sack over her head and tries to abduct her.
17 December 2010