EN 5 Second Review:

"Quite a few laughs, although there are times when it verges on crossing the line"
Peter Veugelaers: Entertainmentnutz.com



Although arguably the best laughs you’ll get all year round, Borat is nevertheless controversial. It’s the style of its naïve television reporter, though, which generates guffaws and not the suspected offensiveness. Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev, played by Ali G incarnation and British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, displays an innocent cheekiness and formidable naivety about stepping on people’s toes, which inevitably has got this film into hot water, exposing how offended people were, especially in today’s politically correct milieu.

This mockumentary premise is precisely a great hook. A T.V. reporter from a village area of Kazakhstan goes, with his producer, in search of real America among mostly ordinary folk there. Borat provides hilarious leverage between him and the real people he interviews. His only information about America is through what he sees in these people. That includes momentum to the storyline, a Baywatch magazine he picks up in a garage sale, which inspires him to go to California to marry Pamela Anderson.

At home, Borat is a polygamist, his sister is a prostitute, they have a festival called the running of the Jew, and they yell and jibe at one another as a natural part of their interaction, so that’s normal according to the movie.

In the “U.S. of A” (as Borat affectionately emphasises) the people he interviews include feminists, officials, and a raft of everyday folk including a cowboy (who decried Muslims), caring pastors, kindly Jewish folk, and loudy teenagers on a drinking binge.

A beauty of the humour of this doco-mock-comedy is how susceptible the interviewees were and how seriously they interpreted his usually awkward questions, leading to inevitable showdowns at times. Unfortunately, the downside of the making of this mockumentary has led to real lives being affected, such as the producer of a T.V show which interviewed the fictional Borat on the pretence it was real. She got fired. Others are filing lawsuits.

Which leaves me wondering about how sensitive people are to how they are viewed in the media, and whether it is all that powerful.

In response to anti-Semitic criticism Cohen, a Jew, said in Neil Strauss’ Rolling Stone article, “Borat essentially works a tool. By himself pretending to be anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice. When I was in university, there was this major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference’. I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic”.