Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [2006]

Early on, an unwitting humour coach advises Borat about various types of jokes. Borat asks if his brother's retardation is a ripe subject for comedy. The coach patiently replies, "That would not be funny in America." NOT! Borat is subversively, bracingly funny. When it comes to exploring uncharted territory of what is and is not appropriate or politically correct, Borat knows no boundaries, as when he brings a fancy dinner with the southern gentry to a halt after returning from the bathroom with a bag of his feces ("The cultural differences are vast," his hostess graciously/patronisingly offers), or turns cheers to boos at a rodeo when he calls for bloodlust against the Iraqis and mangles "The Star Spangled Banner."

Success, John F. Kennedy once said, has a thousand fathers. A paternity test on Borat might reveal traces of Bill Dana’s Jose Jimenez, Andy Kaufman, Michael Moore, The Jamie Kennedy Xperiment, and Jackass. Some scenes seem to have been staged (a game Anderson, whom Borat confronts at a book signing, was reportedly in on the setup), but others, as the growing litany of lawsuits attests, were not. All too real is Borat's encounter with loutish Southern frat boys who reveal their sexism and racism, and the disturbing moment when he asks a gun store owner what gun he would recommend to "kill a Jew" (a Glock automatic is the matter-of-fact reply). Comedy is not pretty, and in Borat it can get downright ugly, as when Borat and his producer get jiggly with it during a nude fight that spills out from their hotel room into the hallway, elevator, lobby and finally, a mortgage brokers association banquet. High-five! --Donald Liebenson

Synopsis
Sacha Baron Cohen brings his Borat character to the big screen with this feature length adaptation of his American exploits. Fans of DA ALI G SHOW will already be familiar with the devilishly simple Borat formula, in which the heavily moustachioed TV host from Kazakhstan dupes a number of unwitting citizens into revealing their deepest prejudices, and this movie takes that premise, stirs in a little narrative structure, and serves a side-splitting mirth-fest. The action begins with Borat travelling to America alongside his producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian). After a hotel room viewing of BAYWATCH, Borat decides he must travel to California to woo Pamela Anderson, so he and the long-suffering Azamat take a cross-country road trip in an ice cream van, encountering some funny, disturbing, and deeply strange individuals along the way. SEINFELD producer Larry Charles lends his directing talents to BORAT, and he gets the balance between the loosely threaded plot and Borat’s encounters with real Americans exactly right. At times the movie threatens to topple over into glorious anarchy, with each situation escalating to ridiculously funny extremes, but Charles knows exactly when to put the brakes on and progress to Borat’s next encounter--although the police are called at the tail-end of one memorable sequence. Keen-eyed viewers will notice some repetition from the TV show, with Borat once again going to a rodeo and again taking etiquette lessons, but it’s almost as if Cohen treats each of these set-pieces as a comedic ‘bit’ he is working on, gradually adding further delirium every time he goes back for another shot. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell who, if any, of BORAT’s participants are actors, but it matters little when the material is this gut-wrenchingly funny, and it’s testament to Cohen’s talents that he’s managed to take a marginal supporting character from his TV show and turned him into a genuine cultural phenomenon.

• DVD & Blu-ray > Audio Description
• DVD & Blu-ray > Comedy

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