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Borat

November 26, 2006 Jeffrey Williams 2 Comments

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When I was three, as the story goes, I turned to my mom in the middle of a Roman Catholic mass and asked her “If Jesus was Jewish, then why are we Catholic?”

Some people are just born dissidents.

Sacha Baron Cohen is another natural provocateur. The one-time Oxford scholar creates and inhabits characters whose primary purpose is to peel back the façade of modern living. He first found a cult following with his character Ali G, a wannabe gangster who aspired to celebrity status but was too dim to tie his own shoes. With persistence and a bullet-proof legal release, he scored interviews with Boutros-Boutros Ghali, Noam Chomsky, Pat Buchanan, and a horde of other unsuspecting public political figures. Using a nearly incomprehensible London street patois, he tripped up his interview subjects with malapropisms and pseudo-logical leaps that made his subjects look foolish for even considering answering the question. Watching Pat Buchanan squirm on the issues of “BLT’s in Iraq” is pricelessly funny, because you’re both in on the joke, and you’re not sure that Buchanan knows what he’s talking about when he answers.

Borat, the “sixth most famous reporter in Kazakhstan,” is Mr. Cohen’s sublime comic creation. Owing a debt to of some of Peter Sellers’ best creations, namely Chauncey Gardner and Inspector Clouseau, Borat the character is an innocent man-child, imitating first-world society without any awareness of his missteps. Borat – the performance – is a finely tuned high-wire act, where Mr. Cohen expertly calculates how far he can push the manners of his hosts before they storm off in exasperation. Borat is, in many ways, a funhouse mirror, mimicking the conventions of American life and exaggerating them with his tone-deaf lack of finesse.

A homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semite second-world man vying for a place among first-world sophisticates, He is a man who has confused ego with intelligence, and sweetly holds a single-minded belief that his way of life is something everyone should aspire to. After all, he has a clock radio that his asshole neighbor can’t afford, and his sister is the #4 prostitute in all of Kazakhstan. If that claim to greatness isn’t equal to your bumper sticker announcement that your kid is an honor student somewhere, then what is?

In the film, the Kazakh government sends Borat to investigate what makes the United States such a fantastic place. In the current political climate, such gung-ho Americanism almost automatically plays as satire, though the films agenda is much softer. Shortly after arriving, Borat decides that the buxom Pamela Anderson represents the ideal of America (despite her Canadian passport), and the loosely threaded plot details his trip to California to capture her in a Kazakh wedding sack. From the opening frames of the film, his introduction to the audience couldn’t be more endearing. Surrounded by his exuberant fellow villagers, he talks directly to the audience in a deeply broken English. “Jagshemash! My name Borat! I like you! I like sex. Is nice!”

From the moment you look at him, with his lanky and disjointed body and disturbing mustache, you feel the warmth in his character. “I like you!” he says, and he truly means it, in the way a fourth-grade pen-pal from Malaysia means it. Borat should come across as a cheesy politician, used car salesman, or a failed porn star, but his genial helplessness just induces sympathy. It’s impossible to resist the sweetness, and the inappropriateness of the follow-up, “I like sex” gets laughed away with a gentle forgiveness. After all, we’re taught to be nice and forgiving to others, and it’s that grey zone of unspoken manners that gives Borat room to play.

On television, Mr. Cohen’s characters are using the language of the medium against its most prominent practitioners. Ali G and Borat bend and distort the sound-bite practice of news interviews to reveal how shallow the media process can be. The most notorious stunt Borat pulled on television involved a sing-along at a cowboy bar in Arizona. He took the stage, telling the bar patrons he would sing a traditional song from Kazakhstan with a rousing chorus of “throw the Jew down the well, so my country can be free!” By the third chorus, while wearing a clownishly large cowboy hat, he had the entire bar lustily singing along. Good ol’ boy Americana meets old-world anti-Semitism and the two are shown getting along like a cross on fire. On television, it was sharply pointed satire. Presented like a newsmagazine segment in faux-news format, the short clip made the bar patrons seem buffoonish, and made Mr. Cohen’s performance scandalous and outrageous.

Television is fluid, a grainy digital video stream acting as an instant finger on the pulse of society. Cinema tends toward the epic, legendary, and immobile. Borat shines on the big screen because his performance is less about political commentary and more of a deft comedy of manners. The bear roaring out of an ice-cream truck; chasing a live chicken around a subway car; or fumbling through the destruction of a Texas pawn shop are some of the better physical comedy movies have seen recently. In a similar vein, Borat’s interview with perennial right-wing candidate Alan Keyes would be turned into ironic political humor on television. On film, the highlight of the interview is watching an uncomfortable Keyes explain to Borat that his flamboyant new friends are homosexuals and not just friendly Americans. The joke here isn’t on Keyes, who is visibly uncomfortable delivering the news. It’s on Borat, and the sense of pathos and shame that creeps across his face as his gay activities slowly sink in.

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Filed Under: Film Review Tagged With: Borat, Film, Television

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Comments

  1. Arp says

    April 1, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    Man. Reading this makes me feel as smart as Dubya. I just plain laughed my arse off, but you articulated the whole thing perfectly. Jagshemash!

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Old friends, old habits | tiny grass says:
    April 14, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    […] Not that I needed a push – I’ve been inclined to sever friendships if things didn’t feel right.  Ask my now-friend-again Jeff, who was a friend my freshman year of college, fell out of favor the next year and once did a damn good job of needling me by stating loudly something like ‘That’s Arp – he’s not our friend anymore’ with a nice shit-eating grin.  That irritated me at the time, but it’s really funny as hell now.  Like Madame Blavatsky, he has the sight.  Or at least he can explain crap way better than me. […]

    Reply

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