[lbo-talk] Borat

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 11/7/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote:
>
> > On 11/7/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> Oh, the Guardian is pompous and overwrought as always.
> >>
> >> That said, Kazakhstan is an odd choice of country to
> >> make fun of. The Kazakhs are rich. It's not a backward
> >> country.
> >
> > I'm afraid the idea may have been any -stan would do.  :->
> ========================
> The intent is a universal one. Borat is another riff, fair or not, on "the
> idiocy of rural life" - and more so in the southern US, where the movie is
> mostly set, than in the the fictionalized "Kazakhstan", which is glimpsed
> only briefly at the beginning, and is so over-the-top that it lacks
> satirical punch. The mirror of America which "Kazakhstan" in the form of
> Borat represents soon becomes apparent to an urban Western audience which I
> think explains a good deal of the movie's popularity in the Age of Bush. In
> general, apart from mostly being wildly funny the identification of
> homophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, racism, and chauvinism with backwardness
> and ignorance has a progressive thrust. That said, the Borat sketches in the
> film are not as clever as those he has done on the Ali G show. You can
> probably catch these on YouTube.

I have yet to see Borat the Film, but I saw Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat
(appearing in character) on Jay Leno's show.  On its own, the Borat
performance is essentially a minstrel show, except the character is
Kazakhface, rather than Blackface.

A couple of things that I have learned about Cohen:

He was a member of Habonim Dror, a left Zionist youth movement (at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habonim_Dror>);

"Most of the 'Kazakh' dialogue in the film is the actor speaking
Polish or Hebrew, as the actor speaks Hebrew fluently and uses this
language around unfamiliar Americans when keeping up his character's
foreignness" (at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borat>).

Is that true?  If it is, Hebrew as Kazakh could give a very
interesting twist to Cohen's minstrelsy . . . provided the audience
understood the language (though the point would be lost on me as I
don't know Hebrew, alas).  Has any reviewer discussed this point?
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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