Borat: Sacha Baron Cohen's
tackles anti-Semitism,
misogyny and racism in
"road" comedy.
Coming To
America
Da All G Show's Sacha Baron Cohen brings his
Kazakh journalist character to the big screen.
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
S
acha Baron Cohen is anything
but a fool. He just plays one in
Borat: Cultural Learnings of
America For Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan.
Borat Sagdiyev is a Kazakh television
reporter and one of the fictional creations
whom British-Jewish comedian Baron
Cohen portrays on his popular Da Ali G
Show on HBO.
The premise of Borat is that the lanky,
mustachioed journalist is visiting America
to shoot a travelogue-style documentary
for viewers back home — while searching
for Pamela Anderson. He is the innocent
abroad, the naive fellow unschooled in a
foreign and ostensibly more sophisticated
culture.
While his antics are intended to be
amusing, the real laughs derive from the
response he provokes in people taken in
by the ruse.
Borat's ignorant yet straight-faced
putdowns — of Jews, women, homosexu-
als and Roma (or Gypsies, as Borat calls
them) — are intended to lull the ordinary
people he encounters into revealing their
true colors. The filin's humor largely
derives from watching how far people will
bend to excuse and accommodate inap-
propriate behavior before they snap.
Borat starts his journey on the East
Coast but spends remarkably little time
in New York City. Perhaps its diversity
translates into less prejudice, or maybe too
many residents recognize the character
and can't be tricked.
So Borat heads south, where he has no
trouble finding an unsuspecting audience.
The movie got mostly rave reviews
at September's influential Toronto
International Film Festival, with
Entertainment Weekly calling it one of
the funniest, most entertaining satire films
in years. And an overly serious New York
Times story after Borat's Toronto pre-
miere weighed in on the film's critique of
anti-Semitism and challenge to moviego-
ers' anti-Jewish leanings or complacency.
Yes, Baron Cohen is making fun of
social mores and accepted etiquette in
these crass sequences, but in reality the
film is not edgy enough to offend Jewish
viewers and not smart enough to make
non-Jewish audiences think.
Baron Cohen's anti-Semitic Borat is not
really a useful fool — that is, one who wit-
tingly or unwittingly exposes a society's
foibles and fissures. And so the movie is
more a pileup of laughs than a pungent
satire.
In real life, the 35-year-old performer
was born into an Orthodox Jewish family
in London, the son of a menswear shop
owner and an Israeli mother. He remains
a religious, kosher-observant Jew. He stud-
ied history at Christ's College, Cambridge,
showing real potential for an academic
career, and wrote his thesis on Jewish
involvement in the American civil rights
movement.
Coming up for the actor after Borat
is Dinner for Schmucks, in which "an
extraordinarily stupid -man possesses
the ability to ruin the life of anyone who
spends more than a few minutes in his
company."
After that, it's Curly Oxide and Vic
Thrill, in which Baron Cohen plays a
young Chasidic Jew who forms a band
with an aging rock 'n roller. 1
Tom Tugend of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
contributed to this article.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of
America For Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan, rated R,
opens Friday, Nov. 3, in area the-
aters.
November 2 @ 2006
53