Borat madness at T.O. filmfest

As everyone now "knows," Kazakhstan is a backward land where the national drink is fermented horse urine.

It's a place where prostitutes are nationally ranked, where horses have the vote but women don't, where the Premier's wife's duties include sleeping with foreign dignitaries, and where villages across the country celebrate the traditional "running of the Jew" (an event where "Mrs. Jew" lays an egg which villagers are encouraged to smash before it hatches).

The beauty of Borat Sagdiyev, the grey-suited "foreign-smelling" Kazakhstani reporter from Da Ali G Show, is that the character's creator Sacha Baron Cohen has chosen to slander a country most people don't even know exists.

It's not the first time some unlikely and even nondescript nation has been the butt of an irony-soaked joke.

In the '70s, the National Lampoon carried on a parody propaganda war against the "evil Dutch." In 2000, Blame Canada -- a mock-maple-leaf-hating song from South Park: Bigger, Longer &Uncut -- was nominated for an Oscar.

Unlike the Dutch (who didn't know and didn't care), and Canadians, who generally, weirdly, loved the attention, Kazakhs are outraged by the wildly anticipated mock-documentary feature Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan.

Or at least their government is. Government officials muttered about legal action after Borat's appearance on the 2005 MTV Europe Music Awards. And in anticipation of the movie's release and the White House visit of Kazakh President Nazarbayev, the government bought four pages of advertising space in the New York Times to speak the mundane truth.

Which is, that Kazakhstan is a Central Asian country with a lot of oil and oil money, a no-worse-dressed Alberta or something. And as former Soviet republics go, it's probably a little better than its Eastern European cousins as far as its treatment of Jews (Uzbeks on the other hand ...).

But we digress. Kazakhstan is not the point of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan. Nor is Borat himself. Like Archie Bunker 35 years before him, the character is a set-up, a buffoon whose job it is to say the most outrageous things about women, Jews, ethnic minorities, etc., deflating bigoted views by clearly making them the province of the idiotic.

This is tricky ground, of course. Saying one thing and meaning another is the essence of irony, and irony is appreciated only by those with a sense of humour. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League recently expressed concerns about the character, while insisting that it "got" the joke, warned about others not getting it. In a press release, it noted that Cohen "is himself proudly Jewish. We hope everyone who chooses to see the film understands Mr. Cohen's comedic technique, which is to use humour to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti-Semitism and other phobias born of ignorance and fear.

"We are concerned, however, that one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry."

And so we arrive where we do so often in our culture, at a place where you not only have the presumed responsibility for what you say, but for how the "less sophisticated" interpret it. The Beatles are responsible for Charles Manson, the guys from Jackass are responsible for every cretin who decides to ride a grocery cart down a hilly street, Marilyn Manson is responsible for the Columbine massacre just as video games were responsible for Dawson College. Maybe instead of a rating system based on age, we can come up with one based on "sophistication" (no one admitted unless they can tell the difference between a metaphor and a simile).

Put it this way, despite how much he wants to distance himself from certain statements, Mel Gibson has a lot more fans on the Internet these days, the kind who post on blogs and usenet groups under assumed names.

But the big difference between Borat and Archie Bunker is that Cohen flushes out real-life bigots in the course of his work. Imagine if Archie had toured the U.S., making new, like-minded friends. In Da Ali G Show, Borat is on a continual tour of America, the proverbial "fish out of water" whose Old World sensibilities are tickled by Americans and their outlandish ways.

Except that he keeps finding people who "agree" with him, like Republican Congressional Candidate James Broadwater who commiserated with Borat on camera that Jews are destined for Hell (a political faux pas, as it turned out).

There's nothing that can really prepare you for Borat in Cultural Learnings Of America entering a gun shop and asking "What kind of gun would you recommend to kill a Jew?" The blithe response: "I'd recommend a 9mm or a Glock automatic." Did the guy not really hear the question, or is it the kind of question the gunshop owner hears all the time?

The evildoers who get tripped up by Cohen's joke make the enterprise all the more worthwhile and brave (and adds a frisson of shock that makes laughs sound more like screams).

At other times, you feel sorry for the people who fall into Borat's orbit, well-intentioned as they sometimes are, trying to help a maladroit "foreigner" assimilate and going the extra mile to accommodate his sensibilities (like the Oklahoma City council, which observed a 10-minute "silence" at Borat's behest to commemorate the fictitious "Tishniek massacre").

What can't be denied is Cohen's commitment to the joke. He stayed in character during his entire stay in Toronto at the Film Festival in September, just as he did in Cannes in the spring.

More importantly, he kept it up through the entire guerilla-filming of Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan.

There is a clear sense of danger when he approaches total strangers on the New York subway, offering them friendship and a live chicken (some passengers threaten him with outright physical violence).

And as the film progresses, Borat abandons his original assignment to profile New York City in order to fulfill his new destiny -- to capture Pamela Anderson and carry her off in a traditional Kazakhstani wedding sack.

Without giving away too much of this climactic moment, suffice to say Pammy is not a good enough actress for this to be anything but real -- as is the physical force which is ultimately applied against our hero.

Even director Larry Charles (a sometime writer for Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm) played along at the Toronto fest. At the truncated first screening of Borat (where the projector broke down 15 minutes in), Charles praised "Sacha and his amazing, amazing ... very brave performance."

But when asked how long he had known Sacha, he said "I know a very sincere Kazakhstani journalist named Borat. That's who I know."

Come this Friday, millions more moviegoers will know him too -- or at least the "sophisticated" ones will.

SACHA BARON COHEN