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

Synopsis: Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a Kazakhstani TV personality who travels across the USA for  a documentary on American culture.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s strength as a comedian is not in his epigrammatic wit but in his ability to create characters that in their hyperbolic way exert a fascination over us. He will no doubt not get as much mileage out of Borat Sagdiyev as Chaplin did out of his Little Tramp but with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan he has fashioned a consistently funny and surprisingly credible film from the cretinous adventures of one of his three personae from his UK television series, Da Ali G. Show.

The film opens with a Kustarica-like canvas of poor Kazakhstani villagers, wheezing gypsy music and typically po-faced, and tasteless Cohen humour dealing with subjects such as retardation, prostitution, rape, sodomy and “The Jews”.   This is none too promising material but once in America, accompanied by his slovenly, obese producer, Azamat (Ken Davitian) the fun begins as the pair work their way from New York to Los Angeles in a de-commissioned ice-cream truck on a road trip of truly absurd proportions. Even though we know that Borat is a fictional character, as a faux-documentary of sorts Borat is well-made.  Some of the segments are clearly set-up (including a hysterical nude wrestling match with his producer) but as many are spontaneously real. It is in the latter cases that the film finds its unique strength. 

Without mercy and a huge amount of trademark chutzpah Cohen uses the apparently gormless Borat character not so much to lampoon red-necks, born-again Christians, gun-dealers, self-improvers and other staples of American culture as to have them lampoon themselves. Director Larry Charles, who co-developed Seinfeld and stars in his own television series Curb Your Enthusiasm is well-known for his mordant sensibility and there is a more than a tinge of existential horror in the well of conformism, bigotry and downright stupidity which Borat seems to so effortlessly uncover in his travels through the South. No doubt good planning and good editing is part of this but it is clearly only a part and this quotient of reality raises the film above the merely exploitational and makes it so often embarrassingly revealing.

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