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New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
Nov 26 2006
New film pokes the Borat
Sunday November 26, 2006
By Peter Calder
The Russian Club, around the back of a restaurant in Newmarket,
Auckland, is the kind of place Borat Sagdiyev would be very much at
home. Lurid light bounces off a mirror ball and plays on the couches
and curtains.
On the dance floor, a tall, moustachioed man could very easily make a
fool of himself by disco-jiving extravagantly in a too-small,
blue-grey suit.
Borat might be welcome at the club, where immigrants from the
countries of the former Soviet Union gather and converse in Russian.
But Borat's alter-ego and creator, English comedian Sacha Baron
Cohen, would surely have a bit of explaining to do.
His film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which opened in theatres this week,
has launched the gangly television character's big-screen career. But
it has offended at least some of the more than 16 million natives of
Kazakhstan, the massive central Asian republic that the title
character ostensibly hails from.
Borat - a cringe-inducing mixture of racism, sexism, homophobia and
social ineptitude - is intended as a parody, of course, and also as a
sort of comic guerrilla who tricks his targets into revealing the
hideous attributes he pretends to embody. But not everybody's
laughing.
The Kazakh Government went so far as to take out advertisements in
the New York Times condemning Borat as "a concoction of bad taste and
ill manners which is incompatible with the ethics and civilised
behaviour of Kazakhstan's people".
In the Russian club, over glasses of robust Georgian red wine, Andrei
Goubarev and Vadim Novikov tell me they actually found the film quite
funny. They liked the naked wrestling scene - surely the most
appalling moment in a film full of them - and Goubarev assures me
Kazakhs are very good wrestlers. The bits where Borat gets stuck into
mothers-in-law and feminists particularly tickled them.
Goubarev, 27, and Novikov, 31, regard Kazakhstan as home. Even though
they are ethnically Russian, they grew up in the world's
ninth-biggest country that stretches across all of Central Asia.
"It's our motherland," says Novikov.
They reckon the only truly offensive moments in the film come near
the beginning, when Borat ridicules his mother and kisses a young
woman called Natalya before introducing her as his sister and "number
four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan".
"Saying his sister is a prostitute," he says, "in any nation you
would find this really offensive."
I suggest to him that most New Zealanders would regard bestiality as
pretty poor form but never get offended when Australians make cracks
about sheep-shagging.
"Well, maybe it is because Kazakhstan is a mainly Muslim culture and
respect for mothers and sisters is stronger than in other cultures,"
says Novikov.
Cohen has said that he made Borat Kazakh "because it was a country no
one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on
stereotypes they might have. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. The joke
is on people who can think that the Kazakhstan I describe can exist."
Goubarev and Novikov take the point, noting that the country depicted
in the film's opening scenes looks nothing like theirs (it was shot
in Romania) and none of the characters speaks Kazakh: Borat's
greeting is in Croatian, he speaks in snatches of Polish, Hebrew and
Yiddish and his offsider Azamat speaks in Armenan.
"But why choose Kazakhstan?" Novikov asks. "Why didn't he make it
about a non-existent country and call it Berbistan or something like
that."
He detects a geopolitical conspiracy here because Kazakhstan has
stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia against George W Bush. But
since the film's most obvious target is actually America, that's hard
to argue.
The pair happily offer assurances that Kazakh cars aren't horse-drawn
like Borat's. "You can find more Mercs there than in Auckland,"
Goubarev says. And no, he says, he is not in the habit of giving his
sister deep tongue kisses. "I kiss her as my sister," he says.
"That's it."
Nov 26 2006
New film pokes the Borat
Sunday November 26, 2006
By Peter Calder
The Russian Club, around the back of a restaurant in Newmarket,
Auckland, is the kind of place Borat Sagdiyev would be very much at
home. Lurid light bounces off a mirror ball and plays on the couches
and curtains.
On the dance floor, a tall, moustachioed man could very easily make a
fool of himself by disco-jiving extravagantly in a too-small,
blue-grey suit.
Borat might be welcome at the club, where immigrants from the
countries of the former Soviet Union gather and converse in Russian.
But Borat's alter-ego and creator, English comedian Sacha Baron
Cohen, would surely have a bit of explaining to do.
His film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which opened in theatres this week,
has launched the gangly television character's big-screen career. But
it has offended at least some of the more than 16 million natives of
Kazakhstan, the massive central Asian republic that the title
character ostensibly hails from.
Borat - a cringe-inducing mixture of racism, sexism, homophobia and
social ineptitude - is intended as a parody, of course, and also as a
sort of comic guerrilla who tricks his targets into revealing the
hideous attributes he pretends to embody. But not everybody's
laughing.
The Kazakh Government went so far as to take out advertisements in
the New York Times condemning Borat as "a concoction of bad taste and
ill manners which is incompatible with the ethics and civilised
behaviour of Kazakhstan's people".
In the Russian club, over glasses of robust Georgian red wine, Andrei
Goubarev and Vadim Novikov tell me they actually found the film quite
funny. They liked the naked wrestling scene - surely the most
appalling moment in a film full of them - and Goubarev assures me
Kazakhs are very good wrestlers. The bits where Borat gets stuck into
mothers-in-law and feminists particularly tickled them.
Goubarev, 27, and Novikov, 31, regard Kazakhstan as home. Even though
they are ethnically Russian, they grew up in the world's
ninth-biggest country that stretches across all of Central Asia.
"It's our motherland," says Novikov.
They reckon the only truly offensive moments in the film come near
the beginning, when Borat ridicules his mother and kisses a young
woman called Natalya before introducing her as his sister and "number
four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan".
"Saying his sister is a prostitute," he says, "in any nation you
would find this really offensive."
I suggest to him that most New Zealanders would regard bestiality as
pretty poor form but never get offended when Australians make cracks
about sheep-shagging.
"Well, maybe it is because Kazakhstan is a mainly Muslim culture and
respect for mothers and sisters is stronger than in other cultures,"
says Novikov.
Cohen has said that he made Borat Kazakh "because it was a country no
one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on
stereotypes they might have. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. The joke
is on people who can think that the Kazakhstan I describe can exist."
Goubarev and Novikov take the point, noting that the country depicted
in the film's opening scenes looks nothing like theirs (it was shot
in Romania) and none of the characters speaks Kazakh: Borat's
greeting is in Croatian, he speaks in snatches of Polish, Hebrew and
Yiddish and his offsider Azamat speaks in Armenan.
"But why choose Kazakhstan?" Novikov asks. "Why didn't he make it
about a non-existent country and call it Berbistan or something like
that."
He detects a geopolitical conspiracy here because Kazakhstan has
stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia against George W Bush. But
since the film's most obvious target is actually America, that's hard
to argue.
The pair happily offer assurances that Kazakh cars aren't horse-drawn
like Borat's. "You can find more Mercs there than in Auckland,"
Goubarev says. And no, he says, he is not in the habit of giving his
sister deep tongue kisses. "I kiss her as my sister," he says.
"That's it."