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

When the first Borat movie was released I was around 13 or 14 and unfamiliar with Sacha Baron Cohen’s works but the film was fairly popular with my age bracket, mostly for his funny accent than anything else. I bought the DVD because this was back in the days before I knew about pirating movies and I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and despite several viewings I never found a taste for the humour, finding the anti-Semitism and shock value jokes leaving a bad impression on me. I gave the DVD to a friend and never thought about it much more after that.

Now with a sequel released that’s received similarly strong reviews, I figured I should take another chance on Borat and his funny accent and see if being older and wiser means I can find a new appreciation for his style of humour.

Spoiler alert – Not really.

In 2006, Kazakhstan reporter Borat Sagdiyev is tasked with going to America and doing a documentary on their lifestyle and culture, with only his producer Azamat for company, Borat makes the trip half-way round the world to the betterment of his home nation. While in America, Borat is shown many strange concepts that blow his sheltered little mind like feminism, western humour and most importantly of all, Baywatch which introduced him to Pamela Anderson. Instantly in love with her, Borat tricks Azamat into driving from New York to California to find her, under the guise of shooting more footage for their film.

The story isn’t the important element here, since a lot of the film was improvised with unassuming people it’s just an excuse to keep Borat moving forward, and in that regard it’s not bad, horniness is as good a reason as any for Borat to travel across America and some of the story related scenes are quite good – the wrestling scene in particular is unforgettable. For the actual crux of the movie though we’re watching Borat interact with supposedly unaware Americans (I can’t say for certain how many of them were genuine people and how many were actors) and it’s a very mixed bag, some of the earlier scenes I found humorous for their simplicity, the interview with the newscaster worked well due to the misunderstanding of what Live TV is, while later on the cringe factor got way too much to handle as was the case of the Southern Dinner which I had to skip over the last five minutes cause I couldn’t watch it any longer.

Rewatching this film after so long I do have to admit an admiration for Cohen and his guerrilla filmmaking, not only does Cohen fully commit to the performance – the amount of nudity he has on and around himself is immense - and somehow manage to keep a straight face when dealing with the homophobia, racism, sexism and religious dogma of your typical American, but he often puts himself into danger in order to better serve the film and its theme of the outsider looking in, getting this shitheels to admit their prejudices by pretending to be as ignorant as they are. The character of Borat is an interesting one and Cohen does a solid job of bringing him to life, balancing out his hurtful ignorance with a can-do attitude and a drive that most people just don’t have any more. No matter what I have to say about this film, I do find Cohen’s performance and his unfaltering commitment to be a definitive highlight of the whole thing.

Which is good because there’s a lot of the film doesn’t stack up, some of that is down to personal preference, the anti-Semitic jokes I fully understand are just part of the character but the film puts a little too much focus on them at times where it stops being funny and starts being uncomfortable, which I guess is the point but it was too much for me at times. Other times it was just the humour not hitting right, the whole scene with the frat-boys in the RV did nothing for me since the casual racism and sexism combined with the ‘Sup Brah’ attitude just pissed me off. Now don’t take that to mean that the film isn’t funny, there are some good moments, the aforementioned newscaster interview worked, the rodeo anthem showcased casual racism on a much better note than the frat-boy douchebags and the finale with Pamela Anderson - one of the only actors actually in on the whole joke – gave the film a sudden but necessary jolt that worked in its favour. Plus I’ve mentioned the nude wrestling scene enough to admit that the nude wrestling scene still holds up as the film’s best scene where you don’t want to keep looking but every new element means you can’t turn away.

There are funny moments here and I can appreciate what Cohen and his crew are doing by forcing unassuming people out of their comfort zones but there was too much of the film that I couldn’t get behind, be it too awkward to be funny, or sometimes just not funny.

For what it’s worth, I don’t regret rewatching Borat, after a number of years since my last viewing my tastes and understanding of films have changed and I can understand more about what Cohen was doing with the character, his commitment to the film and the gonzo style of filmmaking that you barely see nowadays – especially not on this scale – is impressive and I will say I did chuckle a few times. But a large majority of the humour wasn’t for me, I’ve nothing against tasteless jokes – God knows I’ve told a number of them in my time – but when the crux of the film is to make fun of Americans who are already a bad joke unto themselves, I don’t see the funny side anymore.

6/10