Borat – You Either Love It Or Hate It

If indeed true that this is a documentary film made with real people in real situations, I really pity some of the people who were caught in this one big giant reality TV series in the expense of the audience’s laughter. Borat, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, left his home country Kazakhstan traveled into America hoping to learn the American culture that is going to benefit Kazakhstan. I can buy that plot. What the movie is tying to achieve is to bring out American’s racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and the mentality that they are number one in everything. That I can also accept. It is the execution that at times I found it hard to watch.

Don’t get me wrong. I did laugh very hard almost throughout the show. But when the storyline switched from a series of interviews to cover various topics such as American’s humour and feminism into Borat wanting to travel all the way from New York to California in order to meet and marry Pamela Andersen after watching her acting in Bay-watch at his hotel room, that I found it senseless and hard to believe. In keeping up with the tempo, the practical jokes have gotten cruder and cruder. You will see Borat entered into an antique shop that sold items related to American heritage and he accidentally tripped himself destroying a room full of antiques. You will see Borat carrying a plastic bag of feces out from the restroom asking the hostess of a high society what to do with it (I was surprised to see that in the end credit, it was mentioned who that belongs to). You will see Borat’s face buried underneath a big hairy fat naked man’s ass – Borat’s co-actor – and both of them run out of the hotel room naked crashed into a company function continued the fight on stage till both of them were taken down by the security guards (What are they trying to say except that they have balls to go naked in public and make a fool out of themselves?). And you will see many more worse than this.

I can’t help but ask myself what some of these scenes really trying to say. Shall I be, for instance, laughing to Borat’s success in humiliating hundreds of real people to bring out certain points, if any, or shall I feel pity for those innocent people that are portrait unfairly on a big screen? I don’t know. What I know is that this movie has really gotten high ratings across many sources and the general response is that you either love this or hate this movie. Borat could be one of the funnest shows (and pretty original too) I have seen but I feel awkward watching it.