Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

This is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Every time I glanced around at my fellow members of the audience, they were splitting their sides.

This is the more astonishing since the film is essentially a one-joke story, the joke being the cultural differences between a fantasy nation which we shall call Kazakhstan (whose people seem to be trapped in an imaginary equivalent of the European dark ages) and the United States, or more specifically those parts of it which some of us would like to pretend don’t exist. I suppose that the joke could get old, at some point, but luckily the film, at an hour and 24 minutes, is short enough not to force us to reach that point.

We are introduced to Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen), a Kazakhstani television personality, who lives in a small decrepit village in Kazakhstan where the most popular activity seems to be an annual festival known as the Running of the Jew. He is sent to New York with his producer and a (never-seen) cameraman to film aspects of life in the United States to bring back to Kazakhstan. In his New York hotel Borat, playing with the television set (after someone explains a remote-control to him), happens across an episode of Baywatch, falls in love with Pamela Anderson, and decides that he will marry her after he receives a telegram informing him that his wife Oksana has just been killed and eaten by a bear. The result is an odyssey in a second-hand ice-cream truck across the southern tier of the United States to Los Angeles, where, in what we may with some effort believe is typical Kazakhstani fashion, he attempts to kidnap and make off with Ms. Anderson.

The President of Kazakhstan (the real one), in a recent visit to the United States, apparently complained to President Bush of the United States about this film. If Bush happened to have seen a pre-screening of the film, he would probably have agreed with the Kazakhstani President; Americans in this film (some of them real people such as former Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia and presidential hopeful Alan Keyes) don’t come across any better than the pre-medieval people of fantasy Kazakhstan. See e.g. the gunshop owner who, when asked to show the best weapon for killing Jews, happily does so (though he then refuses to sell the weapon to Borat; it seems that there is some bureaucratic regulation against selling firearms to foreigners).

In one spot, in my opinion, the joke fell through at the end. Borat goes to a rodeo, where he is invited to sing the national anthem to the audience (who number in the hundreds or possibly low thousands). Before he does so (the Kazakhstan national anthem, it turns out, though any resemblance to the real national anthem of Kazakhstan is likely coincidental), he expounds the hopes of his country for America’s eventual victory in Iraq. At the first the audience is applauding, but by the end of his detailed list of desires they seem to be pretty much aware that he is satirizing America and them.

There is also a lot of toilet humor in the film, and one scene which should have been X-rated, the big fight between Borat and Azamat (Ken Davitian), his producer.

Much has been made, as I suggested, about the fact that the real Kazakhstan is not very similar to Borat’s fantasy Kazakhstan. I would like to emphasize this by pointing out that the parts supposedly filmed in Kazakhstan were actually filmed in Romania; but I’m sure that my friend Ionel would quickly point out to me that in the main Romania, too, is not very similar to the film’s Kazakhstan. (As my wife points out, there are places in Mexico that look not too different from Borat’s village, and in fact I’ve seen parts of the United States that look pretty much the same.)

Don’t take any of it seriously; but if you need a good laugh, this is a movie to see.

Despite the fact that Borat doesn’t entirely succeed in getting the audience to go along with him, I suspect the rodeo scene was included due to two elements that were deemed too irresistable to leave on the cutting room floor. First, there’s the unfortunate (and presumably unforseen) incident involving the woman and the horse. Note how the scene ends as soon as we see that happen.

Next, there’s that incredible chutzpah of Cohen so brazenly testing the patience of an audience where people display the confederate flag and openly talk of locking up homosexuals. I was clawing my seat for fear the poor guy would get lynched.