New ‘Ali G’ Film: More ‘X’ Than X Men?
Last night at Cannes, FOX — our little old 20th Century FOX — presented a stealth screening of the funniest, lewdest, coarsest and potentially gigantic hit of the year. The title is “Borat,” and if this 88-minute comedy manages to get an R-rating, the world as we know it may never be the same.
The e-mailed invite read:
Kazakhstan Ministry of Information
Present You Invite to special screening of:
BORAT
CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA
FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION
OF KAZAKHSTAN
Borat, of course, is the invention of comedian Sascha Baron Cohen, aka hip-hop interviewer "Ali G." Perhaps you’ve seen "Da Ali G Show” on HBO? The producers of this film, who traveled the United States to hoodwink real people into being on camera with Cohen, are hoping you have not seen the show. In fact, they specifically chose areas where HBO viewership was lowest to pull off a series of mind-boggling stunts.
The film falls somewhere between "Candid Camera" and "Carlos*ass" as Borat, Cohen’s gray-suited, moustachioed television interviewer from Kazakhstan meets, insults, annoys and disgusts anyone with whom he comes in contact. Cohen never breaks character from Borat, counting on the sympathy and gullibility of people Borat meets to offer him leeway — at least initially — because he has a funny accent.
Because of that, Borat is disarming when he encounters innocents: He kisses every man on both cheeks, sometimes on the lips. He genially convinces a well-dressed Midwestern woman to show him how to perform bathroom ablutions — and then invites a large-breasted prostitute to dinner at the woman’s home. There is endless sex talk, something like a parody of Roberto Benigni’s Oscar proclamation, “I want to make love to all of you!”
The plot, such as it is, involves Borat and his sidekick Azamat (a surreal performance by little-known character actor Ken Davitian) traveling to New York and then across the United States, filming all their adventures. The Russian satellite country of Kazakhstan (Romania was used as a stand in), already unhappy with Cohen because of the “Da Ali G Show,” is so thoroughly and hilariously trashed in this movie that even shuttle diplomacy may not undo the international damage. Borat, for example, travels with live chickens in his suitcase, and routinely refers to the "town rapist" while his overweight shrew of a wife threatens to kill him if he doesn’t come home.
But there are also some sequences that will defy censors, including one extended bit in which Borat and Azamat (sounds like HAZMAT), his sidekick — a thick eye-browed sort of Sancho Panza with breasts larger than Pamela Anderson’s — wrestle nude in their hotel room. The wildly explicit, freaky mayhem spills out in the hotel elevator and then down onto the stage of a conference of insurance underwriters. The spectacle of Borat — a tall, lanky man, locked in hairy embrace with Azamat in front of several hundred straight-laced businessmen in blue blazers — may present to the MPAA its most confounding challenge ever about to rate a film for public consumption. The scenes are more disturbing than the end of "Hannibal."
Anderson, by the way, becomes the Holy Grail of “Borat,” and it’s hard to say whether she is in on the joke or not. I suspect she is not, as Borat’s journey across America to meet her is a sly and disturbing take on celebrity stalking that should only make personal bodyguards become more popular. Armed with a picture book about Baywatch, Borat is determined to meet the object of his fantasies. When he does, all hell breaks loose as he literally throws a burlap sack over Anderson’s head and carries her away from a book signing. Who knows what she thought was going on? You hope she was clued in, but it’s more than likely she wasn’t.
Also shown in embarrassing cameos typical of "Da Ali G Show" are former Congressman Bob Barr and Congressman Alan Keyes, who no doubt will be none too pleased to see themselves as comic punching bags.
But that’s what makes what Cohen and his chief collaborator, director Larry Charles, utterly brilliant. Charles is a longtime associate of both Seinfeld and Larry David, and Cohen has become a close personal friend of Seinfeld in the last few years. In tone and temperament, “Borat” is the bastard child of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
David certainly approves of the comparison. Charles told me last night that when they screened "Borat" for David in Los Angeles, he stood up half way through and began screaming for them to stop the show. It was too funny.
“Borat” may present some real problems in the long run, however. Because it places Cohen and Davitian among countless numbers of non-actors, some of the people who turn up in the film may not be too pleased. This isn’t actually "Candid Camera" or even "Punk’d." The production company routinely secured releases from participants on the pretense that they were filming for Kazakhstan TV. Cohen and Davitian were presented as their characters, and they never broke from that, not even when shooting ended.
“This was a movie that involved a lot of running,” Charles told me. The police were called on at least 50 occasions by upset victims of the production company’s pranks. The nude wrestling in the insurance adjusters’ meeting sparked a near riot in that conference room, with observers racing to pull the two men off of each other (a truly unsavory prospect).
I don’t want to give too much more away, but between this little gem and the August release of “Little Miss Sunshine,” FOX (and Fox Searchlight) has become the unlikely home of cutting edge comedy.
LMAO the bear in the ice cream truck!
