nuts4chic - film review
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by Vera Brozzoni Fake Kazakh TV journalist Borat Sagdiyev, Sacha Baron Cohen’s third fictional character after British-wannabe-Jamaican rapper Ali G and gay fashion victim Bruno, is already a star on TV and on YouTube.
So what’s so insulting and controversial about Cohen’s 84 minutes of comical spree? Err, simply everything! The story is well known: Borat is sent by his country to visit “the U, S and A” in order to learn some civilization from the illuminated New Yorkers; but not long after his arrival in the Big Apple, he falls in love with the image of Pamela Anderson and embarks with his producer Azamat Bagatov in a coast to coast trip to California, on a dismissed ice cream truck, to propose himself to Pamela. This thin as air plot unleashes a series of rapid-fire sketches showing naive Borat messing around with a wide human casuistry, ridiculing their hypocrisy and social flaws, until his adventures culminate in the infamous nude wrestling scene: aesthetically disgusting but terribly funny for open minded (and thick skinned) people. Admirably, Cohen manages to concentrate multiple offensiveness in every line he speaks and in every goofy move he makes: be it blacks, Jews, women, Wasps, students, every category of human being in America will find something to complain about watching this film; it sounds like Michael Palin’s proud statement about the releasing of Monty Python’s masterwork Life Of Brian: “We pissed everybody off! Everybody!” In order to achieve his evil pursue, Cohen mixes staged scenes, like the dialogues with Azamat or the final attempted abduction of Pamela Anderson (albeit shot in a surprisingly realistic way), with pure candid cameras: to tell the truth, it is not easy to recognize if the most shocking conversations were completely improvised by the comedian or if his interlocutors were following a rough draft - taken for granted that the people featured in the film are not acting, otherwise we would be watching an army of Oscar-worthy professionals! Either way, his genius stands out as he succeeds in creating explosive cultural clashes such as having a posh Alabama lady calling Borat “A lovely man… with a bit of effort he could be properly Americanised” with no trace of irony; but she is later showered with bad surprises. That Borat is a sexist pig that bears little respect to women is evident from the first frame, but his chauvinism reaches sidereal heights when he innocently guffaws in front of a front of feminists and claims that “women have brain the size of a squirrel’s”. On the other hand, his position on homosexuality is contradictory and confuse: he acts like a homosexual in more than one occasion, still thinks homophobic, which leads to a distressed Borat asking “So you think that the man who put his arm in my anus was… was… homosexual?”. These are just two of the many examples of the political incorrectness that the film pushes forward.
The obvious question is: what is all that about? Does it make sense to use a hackneyed candid camera style to blast a bunch of good-willed and inoffensive Americans, who are just trying to be nice with the weirdest Asian weirdo they have ever met? Yes it does, for essentially three reasons: first, the film clearly exposes an alarming rate of anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia by simply letting common people free-wheeling about controversial subjects; second, if you act/talk like an idiot, you have to take responsibility and expect that sooner or later someone will point out at you; third, you watch the film and just laugh your head off all the way through. Moreover, the film does not only make irony about “the others”, but also about Borat himself: he, like his predecessor Ali G, is like a modern Candide with prehistoric views about society, and Cohen certainly does not present him as an example of virtue. But the joke goes even further when Cohen confuses his double status as an actor and as a character: in fact, he always stays in character when giving interviews about the film; recently, as a consequence to the decision of the government of Kazakhstan to sue him, he replied with one more Borat video, in which our hero, wearing his most serious face ever, says: “I’d like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen, and fully support the decision of my government to sue this Jew”. Masterstroke. Chapeau. And if you think twice, although Kazakhstan is depicted by the film as regressive and miserable, Borat is a good-natured citizen who is open to learn anything might do good for his beloved country: much more patriotic and loyal than it seems; not to count the fact that, since the film opened, the country is now having much more free publicity than ever. And by the way, Cohen is not anti-American: check his Borat’s Guide To Britain out on the net and you’ll see. This is Borat: ludicrous to many, outrageous to many others, depending on their rate of irony. Surely it is a film that crosses the boundaries of what can be shown on screen; surely it reaches its goal, which is to make people talk about it. Personally I laughed until I cried, but no matter what is the viewer’s first reaction - more than in other cases, think this film should be seen as a mean of self-examination: if you cringe too much, be ready to admit that your views about sexuality, society, racism, any thing you can quarrel with your friends about, is too narrow. Borat is here to enlighten us, not to just make us laugh. Borat, already saved by a group of extremist Christians in one of the most hardcore scenes of his film, now comes to us with a word of salvation. Let him in, girls, and you won’t regret.
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His hyper realistic humour is already known and digested, yet his film dedicated film has raised hell among the public! Not only the real Government of Kazakhstan has decided to sue popular comedian Cohen for libel, but also the audience of his amazingly side-splitting mockumentary find themselves exchanging insults and curses on forums and discussion groups all over the net.
Scatology is also very much present, but it represents maybe the cheapest way to make people laugh: indeed, the film is more effective not when Borat speaks, but when Cohen leaves other people to speak. 
