Movie Review: Borat

Film Title: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Genre: Comedy and Adaptation

Director: Larry Charles

Two most Important Member of the Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) and Ken Davitian (Azamat)

Review

The movie which simply referred to as Borat is about Kazakhstan’s sixth most famous man and a leading journalist from the State run TV network, Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen), who travels from his home in Kazakhstan to the United States in the request of Kazakh Ministry of Information to make a documentary by reporting all aspects of American life. Together with him is his producer, Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian).

He interviews and interacts with Americans who believe that he is an actual foreign TV personality with no understanding of American’s way of life. Borat, while in New York, falls in love with Pamela Anderson when he saw her in the episode of Baywatch. On one hand, he takes driving lessons upon learning that the wife he left behind has been killed. He, then, buys a dilapidated ice cream truck which he drives from New York toward Los Angeles where Pamela stays. Additionally, Borat wants to have her and make her his wife.

Borat continues to gather footage by meeting feminists, gay pride parade participants, politicians and African-American youth playing Cee-lo for his documentary through the course of his trip across United States. In the course of his footage gathering, he disrupts a meteorologist during a live weather update. He also sings the twisted version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner at a rodeo. In addition, he rents a room from Jewish innkeepers and attempts to buy a handgun which was denied because he is not an American citizen. He purchases a bear instead. Moreover, he attends a high-society dinner in the South and visits an antique shop full of Confederate memorabilia.

Borat and Azamat, both nude, gets into a heated argument in a hotel room. The argument results in a fight which spills out into the hallways, to the crowded elevator and into the packed ballroom. Because of what happened, Azamat leaves Borat. Azamat takes his passport, all their money and the bear Borat bought.

This was a great blow to Borat. But his spirit is further dampened when some drunken University of South Carolina students whom he befriends show him Pamela and Tommy’s video. The video reveals that Pamela is not virgin anymore which Borat thought she was.

By attending a Pentecostal Christian revival meeting, Borat renews his faith. In the same way, learns to forgive his producer, Azamat and Pamela, the woman he wanted to be his wife. Borat finds Azamat who was dressed as Oliver Hardy when he accompanies several church members on a bus going to Los Angeles. Borat mistakes Azamat for Adolf Hitler but in the end they reconcile with each other. Then, they try to track down Pamela.

He finally sees and comes face-to-face with her at an autograph signing at the Virgin Megastore at The Block at Orange in Orange Country, California. In an attempt to make off with her, he chases her around the store and into the shopping center’s parking lot, showing to her his traditional marriage sack, but the security restrained him.

On the other hand, Pamela and Borat did not end up with each other because he marries Luenell, an African-American prostitute whom he had befriended before. Then, he went back to Kazakhstan with his new wife.

Generally, I think that the movie is a mock documentary. Often Borat is mocking Jews. Often he insults African-Americans. But, I’m not quite sure whom Borat is mocking the most ferociously because Cohen who portrays Borat is Jewish and the only person in the movie that he treats with grace and affection is a black woman who is purportedly a prostitute. The reason perhaps is that because it features the series of encounters Borat has with typical Americans beginning in New York, to the Deep South and then to California.

Furthermore, the film’s portrayal of Anti-Semitism is uniformly outrageous and unreasonable that anyone who actually an anti- Semitic may think twice. We can witness the Kazakhstani running of the Jews in which actors wearing monstrous costumes chase the locals. In another scene, Borat and Azamat unexpectedly find themselves checked into a bed and breakfast owned by a nice, old Jewish couple. When two cockroaches skitter under the door, they think that their lives are in danger since they assumed that the couple has used their shape-shifting powers to attach them.

Additionally, the movie is not structured as a satire because it does not ask us to laugh at ourselves by seeing our inconsistencies through the eyes of an outsider but it asks us to laugh at the outsider by seeing him as a contemptible bungle. However, one of the factors which did not get away Borat from the mainstream studio comedy is the terms of nude and crude sex humors which are widespread in the entire story. It contains the usual road-trip jokes and comes with the expected lowbrow stuff which was embodied in the truly horrifying but screaming funny sequence like the naked wrestling of Borat and Azamat.

On one hand, the film’s documentary structure blurs the line between staged scenes and actual commando-style. This was depicted by assaulting unsuspecting people with Borat’s mind-bogglingly offensive ignorance. Correspondingly, Baron Cohen is so good that he vanishes within this character. He deeply inhabits the character of Borat by suggesting some maniacal skills. He is strangely likeable despite his misguided wrongness.

The main problem of the film is that is crosses the line of contemptuous disrespect. The first is the scene where Borat visits a rodeo where he discovers a crowd full of homophobes whom he brayed fro the blood of every man, woman and child in the Middle East. Second is when he sung the Kazakh National Anthem to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner. This deeply insults everyone in both countries. Third is the extended Pentecostal church service which Cohen permeated. Religion is a far too personal thing for such simplistic point-and-laugh ridicule.

On the contrary, that is not the purpose of the film. Its main goal is to show the ridiculousness of the current social and political behavior. It is in these scenes that the movie becomes much more than just a painfully funny and politically incorrect comedy. The film confronted seriousness and prudishness by cutting the core of things like government nattering, shallow Southern hospitality, brainless frat-boy antics. ingrained fear and true ignorance.

What I did not like in the movie is the profanity and sexual content of the story. Borat was shown masturbating inside his pants while standing on a busy sidewalk aside from walking in the hotel completely naked. We can also saw Azamat masturbating. They also got into a long wrestling in nude. And worst was that their wrestling was played off like a pornographic film complete with positional references to anal and oral sex. Additionally, each man’s genitals mashed up against the other’s face.

There were also countless references to incest, rape and pedophilia. These were depicted by the scene where Borat exchanges onscreen groping with gay pride-parade participants and then takes two of them back to his hotel to share an off-screen shower and the part where he passionately kisses a woman and then explained that that woman was his sister whom he proudly introduced as the No. 4 prostitute in all Kazakhstan.

In the same way, Cohen painted a negatively image for Kazakh culture. Borat’s humor coated Kazakhstan a worse backward against United States since it already shaped the perception that Kazakhstan was like this and like that. In such case, Borat shape the future of comedy.