Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Anyone who, after reading the title of this film, has not realised that this is a parody, had better not go and see this film. Unfortunately, the Russian translation corrects all the mistakes in the original: Культурные изучения Америки для того чтобы делать благо славному народу Казахстана.
Anyone who has never heard of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen had better not bother with the genre of comedy at all.
Sacha Baron Cohen is a London-born Englishman who studied history at Cambridge. On a British TV show (Da Ali G Show, 2003) he impersonated three characters: Ali G, a Londoner of Jamaican extraction; the gay Austrian fashion expert Bruno; and the Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiev. Borat Sagdiev had developed from the figures of a Moldovan and later Albanian TV reporter whom Sacha Baron Cohen created. Sacha Baron Cohen appears in public only in character and never as his real self: since the release of Borat he only appears as Borat on talk shows, such as those of Jay Leno in the US and Jonathan Ross in the UK. Since the Cannes Film Festival at the latest, he has promoted Borat Sagdiev, sporting his outrageous slingshot thong for his beach appearances at the Croisette, posing for the cameras.
Borat is one of the biggest box-office hits in the US and had tremendous success after its premiere in the UK at London’s International Film Festival in October.
The various scandals surrounding the film – the first being the offence Kazakhstan took in being presented as a backward country in Borat – have, in a sense, only assisted Borat in promoting his film further and acting out his pranks as a Kazakh reporter. Thus, he gave a statement in front of the Kazakh Embassy in Washington – timed to precede by a day the visit of Nursultan Nazarbaev to the United States. Well – at least after 90 second any viewer realises that this is not Kazakhstan: the letters of the country are garbled, as is the language Borat speaks, which is more a mix of Polish and Hebrew words (his djenkuje hardly can hardly be mistaken for rakhmat). The inhabitants of his native village look like Gypsies while the houses in the settlement and the topography look much more like the Central European mountain ranges, where the film was indeed shot – as we know at the latest since the Romanians from the village Glod are preparing to file a lawsuit against Sacha Baron Cohen for having filmed tem under the false pretence of the crew making a film about the social misery in the remote Romanian village. Kazakhstan has no offence to take, and indeed, Cohen he has now been invited to visit the country.
What is clear, however, are two things: while Cohen has been known to film behind the scenes and walk into advice agencies and television shows to provoke with his offensive behaviour and to expose the masquerade that is the mass media today, he has never made a film that is financially successful enough to make the “victims” of his campaigns want a share of the pie. Secondly, he has never targeted America.
Thus, in addition to the inhabitants of Glod, John Doe I and John Doe II, who appear as students of the Chi-Psi fraternity, also claim to have been filmed under false pretences and filed a suit in California against Twentieth-Century Fox. And the television presenter who let Sagdiev on the program in which he subsequently disrupts the weather forecast claim to have lost her job for not checking Borat’s credentials prior to the show. And, to top it all, the film is stopped from release in Russia because it “содержит материалы, которые некоторому количеству зрителей могут показаться уничижительными в отношении некоторых национальностей или религий”. (“Борат был кастрирован в России”, MEDIA-NEWS.ru, 9 November)
The Federal Agency took issue with the Jewish theme in the film, where the “chase of the Jews” is presented as a ritual in Borat’s native village: two demonised figures with huge papier-mache masks are chased in a rodeo-style race through the town. Moreover, once in America Borat and his producer Azamat are warmly welcomed in by a Jewish family, but flee their house due to their fear of Jews as a result of the above ritual. But let us look for one second at his name to realise that this is a fear of his self and an exposure of the American’s attitude towards other religions and nations that is targeted here. Sacha NOAM Baron COHEN is of an orthodox Jewish family; his cousin Simon is a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, and young Sacha was a member of the Zionist –Socialist movement and spent a year in Israel.
Russia’s ban reveals the ignorance of the censors, rushing to decisions without understanding the plot. Unless, of course, they are terribly intelligent and figured out that this film is real targeted at America, exposing America’s view of the so-called “second world” as backward and superficial.
Borat behaves in exactly the way as an average American would expect people beyond Europe and Australia to act. The film is, if anything, a parody on America’s superficiality: The Kazakh reporter Borat and his producer Azamat travel to America to make a film about the country. Cohen creates a character who is entirely unaccustomed with culture, who lacks education and manners, and who behaves like a barbarian in a civilised country – thus exposing the prejudice of Americans vis-a-vis foreigners, described in official terms – most suitably – as “aliens”..
So while the Americans think they are laughing at Borat, they are laughing at their own prejudices and misconceptions. Indeed, ask an American where Kazakhstan is on the map and they would probably point at Romania; ask what group of languages the Kazakh language belongs to and the answer could well be Slavic languages and not Turkic. Maybe that explains the tremendous success of Borat Sagdiev with his exploitation of American students and Romanian Gypsies.
Birgit Beumers
