Beyond the Cringe
As bumbling documentarian Borat, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen provokes, offends, and embarrasses -- all in the name of good clean satire. But will American moviegoers get the joke?
by Josh Rottenberg
Entertainment Weekly
October 12, 2006
One evening this summer, a number of Hollywood's finest comedic minds gathered in a Los Angeles screening room to watch an early rough cut of a new comedy, awkwardly titled Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The audience, which included legendary stand-up comic Garry Shandling, Simpsons writer George Meyer, 40 Year-Old Virgin director Judd Apatow, and Curb Your Enthusiasm star-creator Larry David, thought they were just there to offer the filmmakers a little helpful feedback. When the movie ended and the lights came up, everyone realized they'd just seen something totally original, perhaps even revolutionary. Capturing the sense of collective astonishment, Meyer turned to Apatow and said, ''I feel like someone just played me Sgt. Pepper's for the first time.''
At first glance, Borat, which opens in theaters on Nov. 3, looks like some weird foreign public-access TV show that has inexplicably found its way onto the big screen. Shot in deliberately crummy-looking video, it's a faux documentary about a TV reporter from Kazakhstan named Borat Sagdiyev, who embarks on a journey across America for the supposed edification of his audience back home. In his travels, Borat encounters a wide range of real-life Americans: Wall Street power brokers, political leaders, Pentecostal churchgoers, genteel Southern ladies, Pamela Anderson. Oblivious to American notions of decorum and political correctness, he cheerfully says appallingly inappropriate and offensive things at every turn in his unique brand of broken English, punctuating them with overeager exclamations: ''I like!'' ''Hi-five!'' ''Very nice!'' ''Sexytime!'' He mangles the national anthem at a Virginia rodeo. He releases a chicken on a crowded New York subway car. He brings a prostitute to a posh Southern society dinner.
Some people are charmed by the seemingly innocent Kazakh bumpkin. Others are simply baffled. Some are outraged to the point of calling the cops. None seem to have the slightest idea that it's all a complete and total put-on: Smile, you're on Kazakh Kamera!
For the uninitiated, the Borat character is the creation of 34-year-old British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, first introduced to a wide American audience in 2003 on the cult HBO comedy series Da Ali G Show. In each Ali G episode, Baron Cohen interviewed unsuspecting subjects in the guise of one of his three alter egos: Ali G, a dim-witted wannabe gangsta rapper/TV journalist; Brüno, a flamboyant Austrian fashion reporter; and the bigoted, horny, anti-Semitic, and yet strangely likable, Borat. Now, with the Borat movie, Baron Cohen has exploded the clueless-foreigner shtick into a wild, mostly improvised 89-minute road movie, creating one of the most elaborate and audacious pranks ever put on film.
In the past few months, the buzz around Borat has been steadily building. Reports from test screenings make them sound like tent revivals, with audiences convulsing with laughter, covering their eyes, and screaming out loud at the blend of merciless satire and over-the-top slapstick comedy, which includes a truly eyeball-searing scene of Borat wrestling in the nude with his obese sidekick, Azamat (character actor Ken Davitian). Following the film's debut at Cannes — which featured the spectacle of Baron Cohen, as Borat, strolling along the Croisette in a neon green thong — the fervor reached a climax at this year's Toronto film festival, where, despite a projector malfunction 12 minutes into its screening, Borat earned a rapturous reception, overshadowing more sober-minded Oscar bait.
Of course, not everyone shares a fondness for this kind of cringe-inducing humor.
The government of Kazakhstan, for one, has denounced Baron Cohen's work as ''a concoction of bad taste and ill manners…completely incompatible with the ethics and civilized behavior of Kazakhstan's people.'' The Kazakh Foreign Ministry last year threatened legal action against the comedian and booted the official Borat website off its Kazakhstan-based domain. The country has launched its own damage-control PR campaign; a recent four-page advertorial touting Kazakhstan's wonders appeared in The New York Times, with unintentionally funny come-ons to potential tourists and investors (''The country is home to the world's largest population of wolves''). All of this has played into Baron Cohen's hands. Last month, when Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev went to Washington to meet with President Bush, Baron Cohen — in a piece of dadaist performance art worthy of Andy Kaufman — showed up as Borat outside the gates of the White House to invite ''Premier George Walter Bush,'' along with O.J. Simpson, Mel Gibson, and ''other American dignitaries,'' to a screening of his movie.
Yet the man at the center of all this hubbub remains shrouded in mystery. Though the highlights of his biography are well established — educated at Cambridge, the comedian, who is Jewish, rose to fame doing the Ali G character on British TV, then crossed over to America in 2000 with an appearance in Madonna's ''Music'' video — Baron Cohen has rarely agreed to be interviewed as himself. In advance of Borat's release, he will only conduct interviews in character, via e-mail. His commitment to his concept is nothing short of extreme. For example, not only is Baron Cohen's Borat mustache real (it takes six weeks to grow), but the drab gray suit he wears is left unwashed to make him smell more ''foreign'' to people he meets. At a time when the line between the real and the unreal in popular culture seems ever more blurred — fake reality TV, fake news, fake Internet celebrities, fake memoirs — Baron Cohen has taken our sense of uncertainty about what can be believed to its logical cinematic conclusion.
Baron Cohen has said that the character of Borat was inspired by a Russian doctor he once met, but one of the undeniable masterstrokes in bringing him to life was having him hail from Kazakhstan. Though Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world — look at a map, the sucker is big — the former Soviet republic represents one of many gaping holes in the average American's shaky knowledge of geography. According to a recent survey, 63 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 24 can't locate either Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map, let alone the country above Uzbekistan and to the right of the Caspian Sea. Even in a time of supposedly heightened awareness about our nation's place in the wider world, Baron Cohen exploits the fact that Americans can be made to believe the most absurd things about life in other countries: say, that women in Kazakhstan are kept in cages, or that Kazakh wine is made from fermented horse urine. The truth is, when playing Borat, Baron Cohen is not even actually speaking Kazakh but mainly pure gibberish with a sprinkling of some Hebrew and Polish.
But even more remarkable than what Baron Cohen gets people to accept about Kazakhstan is what he gets them to reveal about themselves.
Armed with only his smelly suit, cheap microphone, and wide, naive grin, he turns Borat into a cross-cultural Trojan horse, sneaking past his subjects' defenses and giving them license to bare hidden prejudices — to confess, on cable TV, a wish that it were legal to hunt Jews, for example, or to keep slaves. One only hopes the CIA employs people with such skills.
Borat is actually not the first time Baron Cohen has brought his Ali G Show creations onto the big screen. In 2002, he starred in the movie Ali G Indahouse, in which the hip-hop poser was elected to the British Parliament. The film was a hit in England, where Baron Cohen has long been a household name, but was dumped straight to video in the States. By placing Ali G in scripted scenarios with other actors, the comedy lost much of the spontaneity and high-wire riskiness that made Da Ali G Show unique.
Baron Cohen had no intention of making that mistake again. In spring 2003, he brought the idea for a Borat movie to Jay Roach, director of Austin Powers and Meet the Parents. (They were introduced by their manager Jimmy Miller.) Roach agreed to co-produce the movie, and together they pitched the idea to studios, ultimately going with Twentieth Century Fox, which greenlit it immediately. A longtime admirer of South Park, Baron Cohen sought out its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone (whose South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut grossed $52 million in 1999), to bounce around story ideas. When Parker and Stone went off to make 2004's Team America:World Police, he brought in Todd Phillips (Old School) to direct.
The film's initial concept had shades of This Is Spinal Tap, with an American film crew making a documentary about Borat as he traveled across America. After around three weeks of shooting in 2004, though, it was clear that the approach wasn't working — it created too much of a buffer between Borat and his subjects — and Phillips dropped out. ''Ultimately, the creative core of Borat is Sacha,'' says Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairman Jim Gianopulos. ''If there were reasons certain elements didn't work out, that was really Sacha's choice.''
Baron Cohen recognized that, for all his debts to past satirists, from Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain and beyond, what sets his work apart is its total demolition of the boundary between the wildly surreal and the all-too-real. South Park, The Onion, and The Daily Show all offer their critiques from a self-consciously wry, above-the-fray perspective. Even Stephen Colbert does his Bill O'Reilly-ish shtick with a twinkle in his eye, and both guests and viewers are in on the gag. Baron Cohen, by contrast, allows his subjects and his audience no comforting recourse to ironic detachment, giving his social commentary a unique gut-punching immediacy. ''You can't top reality,'' says South Park's Parker. ''We're basically still just in the business of making cartoons.''
After a period of creative retooling, Baron Cohen hired Seinfeld writer and Curb Your Enthusiasm director Larry Charles, whom he'd met at a boxing match, to take the directing reins. In the summer of 2005, with only the barest sense of a narrative in mind, Baron Cohen, Charles, and a tiny crew of about 20 people set off by van to create Borat's American odyssey.
Budgeted at between $15 million and $20 million, the film involved unprecedented guerrilla tactics for a major studio. On the road, there were none of the usual accoutrements: no sets, no trailers, no craft service, and, of course, no real script. Crew members had to essentially double as off-camera actors, often using false names and keeping stonefaced, no matter how insane the situations turned.
The unwitting subjects, whom Baron Cohen and his team carefully selected for their potential comedic value, were handed release forms that were, if not technically bogus, at least ambiguous as to the filmmakers' true intent. ''I don't want to get into the whole process,'' says Gianopulos. ''But people knew in advance they were being taped, so they signed the appropriate documents.'' Asked if the releases said ''Twentieth Century Fox'' on them, he answers, ''I don't know.''
Says Charles: ''I'd tell people, 'Right now this movie is only scheduled to be shown in Kazakhstan. I don't know what they're going to do with it. I'm just here to shoot it.' We were like the Merry Pranksters in a way. These people got dosed.''
One unsuspecting target, Ron Miller, took part in a formal dinner party arranged for Borat in Natchez, Miss. ''We signed the releases without even reading them,'' he admits. ''We have no idea what we signed.'' After suffering through a long and excruciatingly awkward meal, during which Baron Cohen repeatedly attempted to bait his hosts with racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic comments, Miller says he and his fellow victims felt ''emotionally raped.'' To his relief, the scene didn't make the final cut, and he has no intention to sue anyone over the prank: ''Why be made a fool of twice?'' he says. Others may feel differently. Fox lawyers are no doubt standing by the phones.
Occasionally, when Borat would ask a wildly inappropriate question or offer a discourse on some bizarre aspect of life in Kazakhstan, people would wonder if it was all some strange stunt. ''Sometimes people would say, 'Is this real?''' says Charles. ''I'd say, 'Yes, it's totally real.' And in my mind I'm thinking, It may not be the reality you think it is, but trust me, it's real. There's film in the camera.''
Numerous times, especially in the South, Baron Cohen and the Borat crew found themselves in very real physical and legal jeopardy. ''We walked into extremely hostile situations that we then exacerbated into incredibly hostile situations. We got pulled over by the Secret Service in Washington, by the police in Dallas, all sorts of places,'' says Charles. ''Sacha never once broke character. He was fearless.... To maintain the integrity of the character and accomplish what needed to be accomplished in the scene with no second takes or anything — it was an incredibly breathtaking performance.''
Some have expressed concern that Borat's bigotry, particularly his virulent anti-Semitism, goes too far. The Anti-Defamation League recently issued a statement saying that, while it understands Baron Cohen's intentions, it fears that ''the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke.''
Roach doesn't share the concern: ''If you want the anti-Semitism to be clearly anti-anti-Semitism, you have to exaggerate it. You have to take it so far that there's no ambiguity about how ridiculous it is.''
Charles, who is also Jewish, insists that revealing hidden prejudices has not just comedic payoff but redeeming social value: ''At one point, we went into a gun store and Borat asks, 'What kind of gun would you recommend to kill a Jew?' This gunstore guy doesn't hesitate: 'I'd recommend a 9mm or a Glock automatic.' That's one of those moments when you're going, Holy s---, that just really happened. This anti-Semitism is real and it comes from ignorance. You understand it better, and maybe in some way that will ultimately defuse it.''
So what else do we know about the real Sacha Baron Cohen? A few things: He wrote a thesis on the black-Jewish alliance in the American civil rights movement. He is engaged to actress Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers). And by all accounts, despite his mercenary and misanthropic comedy and one alleged confrontation with a photographer at a party last year, he is a thoroughly decent and courteous person. ''When you interact with him, there's nothing that would lead you to believe that he would make the Borat movie,'' says Apatow.
In a way, hunting for these sorts of biographical details is beside the point; it's like trying to get to the bottom of who Woody Allen's Zelig really is. The more interesting question is, Once Borat has had its way with our cultural sensitivities, what will Baron Cohen do next? His recent performance as a gay French race-car driver in Talladega Nights proved he can hold his own with the likes of Will Ferrell in conventional scripted comedy. Now, having likely burned up the chance to keep fooling people with the Ali G and Borat characters, can he find a new avenue for his brand of confidence-game comedy, mining humor in the gap between the real and the fabricated, the serious and the absurd?
Matt Stone, for one, thinks he can. ''The day after I saw the movie, I told Sacha, 'Forget about Borat, you've f---ed that character every way you can — now go do a Brüno movie,' '' Stone says, referring to the final remaining Ali G Show character. ''He can't do a Borat sequel, but people will want to see a Sacha Baron Cohen sequel. People are going to want to see another movie like this, and he's really the only person in the world who can do it.''
Posted:10/12/06)
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