My name, Borat! I like Sex!

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

I have never really watched the Ali G. Show so other than the movie promotional materials, and Borat clips on YouTube this was my first real exposure to this colorful character. Who is Borat? He is Sacha Baron Cohen’s over the top rendition of a weird, quirky eastern European tourist stereotype. Borat is a caricature, a gross crude portrayal that is hard to take seriously, unless you are completely ignorant, sheltered, and xenophobic American.

What Sacha does, is he takes all the crazy, prejudiced notions about the inhabitants of the Kazakh steppes and brings them to life. Borat lives in a country where all the women are prostitutes, where people live in ramshackle ruined huts and share quarters with their cows, and poop squatting in the grass. He is racist, anti-semitic, socially inept uncivilized savage. To believe, even for a minute that he is a real Kazahstani national is preposterous.

And yet people do. Sacha manages to convince many people to truly buy into his act, despite the fact that he speaks neither Kazakh nor Russian. Borat and his movie producer speak to each other in Yiddish. He also manages to sneak in what appears to be a slightly mangled Polish (“Jak się masz?”, “dziękuję” etc..). And yet, no one ever catches on.

He also knows very little about his own nation. Every time he speaks about his country he spews outlandish, hilarious falsehoods that make the audience chuckle. But the people he talks with buy into them without even blinking an eye.

The biggest joke in the movie is not Borat himself, but the Americans he interviews. It’s the racist, homophobic cowboys, the xenophobic, women hating frat boys, the prudish condescending wasp’s and the evangelical zealots in their self imposed Jesus frenzy – they are the real jokes of the movie. Botat, is a character. He is a walking, talking over the top stereotype – but these people are real.

Intentionally or not, Sacha’s movie carries a really disturbing message. As Americans, we often tend to pride ourselves on being one of the greatest nations in the world, but at the same time some of us know so little about the other countries that they are willing to take Borat seriously. We do not need to go to some distant rural village in the Asian steppes to find truly deranged, outrageously backwards, xenophobic, racist, homophobic bigots. We have them in our own back yard.

And this is the real value of the movie. I highly recommend it, unless of course you are from Kazakhstan. In that case you might be slightly annoyed at Sacha’s portrayal. But believe me, most of the people who will watch and enjoy this movie would not believe even for a second that Borat was a real person.

My rating: 4.5 stars