Borat
Directed by Larry Charles
Sacha Baron Cohen, the British-born TV comedian introduced to U.S. audiences in the music video for Madonna’s 1998 single “Music,” is one of those showbiz embarrassments that tasteless people defend as “edgy.” He’s down there in the pits with Andy Kaufman and Neil LaBute, flashing crassness as entertainment. And if it hadn’t been for 9/11, Cohen might have stayed in the pits. His film Borat—in which he plays a mustachioed TV reporter from an impoverished Eastern European Muslim country who comes to America to observe capitalist customs and differences—rises from the pits like sewer gas to pollute the movie landscape. Borat recalls one of those Madonna records whose flatulent sound and odious ideology get promoted into a hit.
It’s crazy that our culture is so screwed up that critics can’t discern Cohen’s stench. Borat is not about politics (the ways in which people get along and govern themselves). What makes it a political comedy is Cohen’s calculated manipulation of our social confusion. After the flop of Cohen’s HBO series “Da Ali G Show,” America’s post-9/11 political chaos has given him a second chance at cultural humiliation. He repeats the “Ali G” premise in which a foreign, malaprop-prone visitor assaults U.S. citizens with the intention of exposing their ignorance. As Borat Sagdiyev, Cohen pretends to document the habits of fly-over America; his red state debauch ultimately pandering to Liberals’ worst instincts. But will moviegoers exhibit the same self-loathing as Borat’s ass-kissing film critics?
Avoid the trap of calling Borat polarizing; that’s a code-word of media-hipsters who long for social divisiveness. They’ve given up on the idea that pop culture can be a unifying force and so praise movies that make them feel superior to others. (“Smart about movies” is the loathsome catch-phrase.) Since 9/11, this elitism has found justification in President Bush’s re-election and the Iraq War, but the contempt is really much simpler. Just as the self-involved Borat scoffs at politics, braying his own sense of privilege and superiority to his fellow Kazakhstani, the current cult of polarization is little more than mean, snarky and juvenile. That’s why Borat, praised as “sharply pointed satire,” primarily consists of genital humor, scatological humor and jokes about deformity and mental retardation. This anti-American propaganda is stupid, but its praise (“the return of evil comedy”) starts to feel a bit seditious. The cult of polarization defends calumny only against Americans who think or feel differently from blue staters. Borat doesn’t dare degrade N.Y./L.A. media-centers or their social presumptions.
In one of the film’s silliest sequences, Borat appears at a rodeo and sings the U.S. national anthem using jokey lyrics. Director Larry Charles chooses reaction shots of beefy, disapproving white folks. Surely Mets and Lakers fans would have felt the same insult (ask Roseanne Barr), but Cohen doesn’t dare risk offending the markets where his checks are signed. It takes evil criticism, not “evil comedy” (whatever that is) to indulge Cohen’s rudeness. Compare it with Talladega Nights—which was derisive about the Midwest’s auto-racing subculture. But Will Ferrell’s satire was mixed with affection. Most of all, Talladega Nights was funny. Borat is not funny—except, perhaps, to 13-year-olds or people who imagine Cohen’s targets (that is, other Americans) as mortal enemies.
In Borat’s interview scenes, the “Candid Camera” gimmick recalls old confrontational hoodwinks, like the one Martin Short perfected by playing showbiz sycophant Jiminy Glick. But Short’s Glick was brilliantly ballsy; he went after celebrities—the real sacrosanct power in contemporary culture. Borat picks on a trio of middle-aged feminists trying to hold on to dignity. The joke is on their age and politeness. “Do you know the word ‘demeaning’?” one of them asks. Borat answers “No”—the same negation he directs toward an etiquette club’s dinner party, a gang of ghetto rap boys, Pamela Anderson fans, any group that might be perceived as voting conservative.
Borat’s cruelty is not surprising; it begins and ends by demolishing the people of Kazakhstan. These toothless, incestuous, corrupt townsfolk recall the pathetic denizens of Slavic director Emir Kusturica’s stylized, cacophonous Black Cat, White Cat. But Cohen’s piled-up ridicule is nastier; it’s a Comedy Central set-up with a Michael Moore follow-through. And the 35mm video transfer is as visually ugly as a Michael Moore movie. Connoisseurs of genuine cinema satire will find nothing like Buñuel’s elegant visual subversion or even the polished absurdism of TV’s “Green Acres.” Still, Borat is primed for dubious “classic” status because it exemplifies the angry Left’s vicious temerity. It should be ashamed that its “dissent” finds expression in Cohen’s “Ethnic-Cleansing” humor.
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