Ah, Borat. This was probably one of the funniest films of its era. I remember this one hitting hard with the youngsters. I was relatively young when this aired, 26 I think; tired with the establishment and the status quo, and this film came at the greatest of times, to just mock everything and anything.
It was an interesting perspective, even when not looking at it from a funny perspective. The whole premise of this film was a fly on the wall look at how silly (and sometimes sensible) our culture can be. There are some things in this film that even had me laughing at myself and the way I do things.
Like most things that Sacha Baron Cohen it's a reflection of our culture. We are no stranger to his products when he started with Ali G in da house with his "me-Julie" which was an entire piss take of British culture, so we received it first before America ever did.
But this is an absolute laughter-fest from start to finish. He has interviews and meetings from what seem to be regular ordinary citizens and watches their reactions as they try to be polite to the gentle foreigner whilst trying to tell him that he's being outrageous.
And that's what he's being in most of this film. I guess he picked Kazakhstan because not very much is known about that country in mainstream thought, so it's easy to pretend to be a backwards farmer out in the middle of nowhere and people believe that it's real. Like when he told the Feminists that he couldn't believe they let the women out of cages! And that his sister was a prostitute. How they just got up and left. Comedy gold.
There is a somewhat sinister underlying message to this film though, and although it's met with hilarity, it also should be noted as to how polite we are in western society and the lengths we'll go to to make someone not from here feel comfortable, or at least back then we did. How this can be used against us, and we see it play out as we laugh at the people in uncomfortable situations not knowing they were the punchline in a joke.
Try doing this in one of the stricter countries and this wouldn't fly. And it's a testament to how safe we've made the west, but also I guess a dire warning too if you can think on both levels there. It's both completely safe and simultaneously dangerous because of how welcoming people are.
Maybe I'm just looking into it too deep.
Nevertheless, dire existential threat warnings aside, this film was comedy gold. And it only serves to highlight the genius of Sacha as he effortlessly portrays someone unfamiliar with our western ways and the strangeness it seems to him through his eyes. He really sells his acting well as he gets the pronunciation of our words wrong and you can see him struggle to say the English too. It's real solid and quality acting.
This will be one for the history books, and I hope it doesn't get lost in the rubble of the puritan era we seem to be going through right now, where everything must be Politically Correct or face dire consequences.
Yet I think it will last the test of time, and we'll rewatch this with fond memories in the future.
A good watch!