Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

‘Borat’: Foul, offensive — and funny

So very, very wrong — yet so very, very funny. That sums up “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s razor-sharp “mockumentary” featuring his character Borat Sagdiyev.

As with “Ali G,” Cohen’s other, more famous, alter ego, Borat — the “second-most-successful” TV journalist in his Central Asian homeland — interacts with clueless victims who appear not to realize their legs are being yanked off. But where Ali G moves in celebrity circles, Borat has a much different agenda.

Here, he has been asked by his government to travel to the “U.S. and A” to meet ordinary Americans, find out what makes their country great and bring those valuable insights back to Kazakhstan.

The film starts with a brief but hysterical tour of Borat’s native village (filmed in Romania; the real Kazakh government, quite understandably, wants nothing to do with this whole thing).

Borat and his dumpling-shaped producer, Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian), are soon headed to America, where they get off to a shaky start on the New York subway. “What is your name?” Borat asks one battle-hardened Big Apple commuter. “My name’s none of your f------ business,” comes the curt reply.

And we’re off on a surreal cross-country trek that stops at a gay-pride parade in Washington, “home of the mighty warlord, Premier Bush,” and a Virginia rodeo where Borat is almost lynched after singing his national anthem. (“Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world; all other countries are the home of little girls.”)

Other stops feature a hilarious late-night cultural exchange with some boyz in da ’hood; a dinner party with genteel, well-to-do Southerners who are left aghast at Kazakh toilet habits; and a fundamentalist Pentecostal revival meeting that is so eerie it makes Borat seem normal.

It all culminates in a wild encounter in Los Angeles with Pamela Anderson, who becomes Borat’s obsession after he catches a “Baywatch” rerun in his New York hotel room early in the film.

It’s hard to believe not one of the many people in this flick were in on the joke, or at least realized at some point they were being punk’d. Perhaps some did, and that footage was left out. Either way, the final product is seamless in that respect — which only adds to its bizarreness.

The conceit, of course, is that this bumbling foreigner is a mirror reflecting and refracting our own prejudices — racism, elitism, jingoism, sexism, anti-Semitism and a few other isms that escape me. It’s a sign of how deftly Cohen does this that a hooker named Luenell ends up being the most sympathetic person in the film by far.

Clearly, this is not a flick for the easily offended. And although much of it qualifies as brilliant satire (all of it too raw to be detailed in a family newspaper), Cohen sometimes doesn’t know when to quit; he’ll take a gag to the edge and then plummet over it without blinking.

When that happens, the tone shifts from uproariously funny to — something else.

In one sequence, Borat and Azamat stage a naked wrestling match over a Pamela Anderson photo book (with a ridiculously large blackout bar obscuring Borat’s naughty bits). It goes on for long minutes as the two, still naked, barge into an elevator full of stunned hotel guests and then crash into a meeting of mortified mortgage brokers.

Lots of shock value — but not much else. Yet although such excesses occasionally throw the movie off kilter, they should come as no surprise. As Borat notes in the film’s press kit:

“I hope you Americans see my movie, but be warn that since it contain foul cursings, needless violence and a close-up of a man’s bishkek, it have been given most strict certificate in Kazakhstan, meaning no one under age of 3 will be able to see it.”

Borat may be a fictional character, but in its unabashedly crude and sneakily subversive way, “Borat” is one of the most brutally honest films of the year.

Jagshemash!

3 stars. Rated R for nudity, sexuality, language, mild violence. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.