BY ELI EPSTEIN-DEUTSCH

In print | November 9, 2006

The only thing I could think to do after watching “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” was to curl up on the couch with a keg can of Heineken and a copy of Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” I sloshed some of the film’s choice scenes around in my head alongside frothy beer and decaying, partially digested nuggets of abstract Continental phenomenology, wondering if my brain was going to turn into a fermenting vortex and suck all of pop culture plus Western thought into itself with a terrifying, fatal slurp.

This didn’t end up happening. Instead, my immediate memory began to assault me with relentless images of two naked, hairy men wrestling violently in a series of the crudest configurations logistically possible. One of these men was Borat with a two-foot-long “censored” shadow obscuring his genitalia; the other man was Borat’s obese “manager,” whose fleshy folds rendered spot censorship technically unnecessary. My mind unavoidably culled the images from a 10-minute hotel room fight sequence in “Borat” that should make the word “obscene” go home and curl up in shame for its descriptive insufficiency.

Sorry, I ought to have said, “Spoiler Alert.” Though I’m not entirely what “spoil” means under the circumstances. Not to worry; in any case, the nude romp is only one of the many visual goodies that lie in store for the viewer of Sacha Baron Cohen’s long-awaited feature film starring Borat, the Brit-Jewish comedian’s chauvinistic, faux-Kazakhstani persona who grins like an idiot underneath a ‘70s porno caterpillar moustache and goes around slandering his alleged homeland while making fools of real live Americans, usually on a segment of HBO’s “Da Ali G. Show.” Freed by the big screen from the constraints of even this most famously permissive of television stations, Borat has succeeded in unleashing a stream of content guaranteed to be consistently, unusually offensive to the sensibilities of all but feral children and adults who grew up as feral children.

The pure unrivaled tastelessness of gags like “The Running of the Jew,” a kinetic festival of caricatured anti-Semitic jollity filmed in Borat’s make-believe native village, must be underscored. To ignore it or, worse, to convince yourself that it is all in the service of incisive satire and therefore nullified, is to be duped as badly as Borat’s hapless interviewees. Perhaps the racist Kazakh tableaux in the film are supposed to parody the Western view of central Asian nations as backwards and hateful, but I doubt it — how many North Americans actually have a distinct preconceived idea of what goes on in any of the “-stans”? The real reason for including “Running of the Jew” in the documentary was far less subtle, I suspect: the spectacle is grotesquely hilarious to behold, and for no redeeming social reasons whatsoever. In its utter unseemly outrageousness it manages to be perversely enjoyable even as it induces visceral cringing.

The same could be said for the greater portion of “Borat.” Perhaps a bit too much time is taken up with the exposition of a highly flimsy plot, in which Borat and his traveling companion, with only a Baywatch magazine between them, take a road trip to California in a bombed-out, U.S.-bought ice cream truck (which looks more like rusted ex-Soviet surplus), in a quest to locate Pamela Anderson. And perhaps longtime fans of “Da Ali G Show” will find some of the customary Borat routines, such as sitting for manners tutoring and then scandalizing Southern socialites with scatological humor, a tad too familiar. But these are mere quibbles, and there is plenty of good stuff to be had along the journey.

It is always delicious, if vaguely horrifying, to hear the responses Borat elicits from down-to-earth, God-fearing American citizens with his naively bigoted prompts. When questioned, a car salesman expounds quite willingly on the utility of his vehicles in crushing crowds of gypsies. A crowd of rodeo attendees claps heartily as Borat expresses his support for the current U.S. war by shouting “George Bush will drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.” Only afterward does the confusion of recognition start to take hold of this audience, and they grow agitated.

Borat’s real satirical trick is that he purports to be from a savage culture, in which the village rapist, for instance, is an accepted community role (this is not actually true of Kazakhstan, I believe), when in fact it is the society he explores that is revealed to be irredeemably savage. In one scene, at an evangelical rally, Borat is assisted in accepting Jesus by several well-known mainstream preachers. As their religious excitement mounts, their facial expressions grow twisted and their fervor comes out in snarls and other bizarre vocalizations that verge on the truly animalistic. Aside from the unfortunate hairy wrestling, it is the image of these powerful, well-established “holy men” has that stayed with me, and it is hard for me now to view America on the whole as anything but a vicious and unstable tribe.

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