In 1831, twenty-five year old aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured American and wrote up his memorable impressions, thereby ushering in a genre of on-the-road literature about the United States that has often been brought to the screen, most recently in Transamerica (2005). Borat: Cultural Learnings of American for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, directed by Larry Charles, is a film about Borat Sagdiyev (played by Sacha Baron Cohen), a fictional TV journalist who travels from his home in Kazakhstan to the United States so that his television viewers can learn more about American culture. The film is supposed to be a comedy, with slapstick vulgarity on a par with Saturday Night Live. Rather than learning about American culture, Borat imposes his own stereotypes onto what he sees, as naïve Americans often do abroad. However, Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry finds much of the movie to be objectionable, and some of the extras are suing for breach of contract. The filming is in Romania, where the village of Glod is upset over of its shabby portrayal, and a lawsuit has been filed to ban further distribution until those scenes are cut. Two Americans who pick up Borat as a hitchhiker have filed lawsuits, charge breach of contract for their filming under false pretences. Yet another problem is that Kazakhs are smoothskinned Asians in contrast with hairy Sacha Baron Cohen, who is a British Jew. The supposed Kazakh “Running of the Jew” festival and later belief that Jewish owners of an American bed-and-breakfast seek to poison him are in very poor taste if not anti-Semitic, though many Americans may not realize that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians (depicting Israel as the aggressor) receives unfavorable media attention outside the United States and might indeed make a Kazakh leery about all Jews. Indeed, “Throw the Jew down the well” is practiced in Kazakhstan, where the local press frequently comments on “International Jewry.” The sexist remarks in the film may have been derived from a practice in Kazakhstan in which men kidnap a single woman whom they want to marry and negotiate later with the parents for the price of the dowry. The main glue that holds the film together is Borat’s lust for Pamela Anderson (playing herself in an uncredited role) after seeing her body displayed on television, as he decides to leave New York to go to California to marry her. Filmviewers may find that laughter during the satire is contagious in a densely packed cinema, but the comedy may fall very flat indeed within the privacy of a home and a courtroom. MH
I
want to comment on this film
