1 Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat
This Week in Cinema (11.13.06)
Borat and 49up
By Beth Capper
Published: November 14th, 2006 | 6:54pm
BORAT
Satire gets away with more, or at least it seems like it does with the recent release of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the feature-length comic pseudo-documentary revolving around another one of Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter-egos. Cohen was responsible for British TV series Da Ali G Show, which, when it wasn’t heavily quoted by every moron on the street, served up amusing skits and revealing interviews with duped celebs and politicians. Borat used to have a cameo on the show, for 10- or 15-minute routines, where he would terrorize the British public with his hard-to-swallow cultural differences.
Borat the film sees Cohen and filmmaker Larry Charles transposing the Kazakh native’s misdemeanors to America, where he intends to learn about the culture so he can take his experiences back to Kazakhstan. Judging from the reactions of cinema-goers all over the world, Borat’s antics are hilarious. But then, isn’t this the same audience that made Jackass the Movie a smash hit?
Borat is offensive, and thinking that doesn’t make you hyper-sensitive or humorless. Instead of opting for interesting and challenging targets, such as prominent members of the evangelical Christian right or unsuspecting American celebrities, Cohen and his team instead unleash Borat on everyday civilians. Some are more sympathetic than others — watching Cohen pretend to be anti-Semitic around a Jewish couple running a bed-and-breakfast is cringe-worthy, while his assessment of women to a group of New York feminists is just a further rub in the face of equality. In fact, misogyny, disguised, of course, as humor, is openly welcomed in Borat, culminating with a frightened Pamela Anderson having a sack thrown over her head by Cohen, who then proceeds to chase her around an L.A. parking lot. The less sympathetic targets are fairly obvious, such as worshippers in a Pentecostal church or three drunken frat boys from the University of South Carolina. While seeing these subjects humiliated doesn’t exactly fill me with rage, Borat’s attempts to show them up are neither big nor are they clever.
Cohen, it is argued, uses Borat’s persona to show how hypocritical Americans are — to show that they are just as prejudiced as nations that are deemed to be uncivilized and archaic. But most of the jokes here fall squarely on Kazakhstan, a country it seems Cohen has never been to, since all of the footage in Borat that takes place “in Kazakhstan” was filmed in Glod, a remote part of Romania. The fact that Cohen is Jewish doesn’t grant him free range over anti-Semitic humor, nor does it mean that he has some special right as a member of a sometimes oppressed religious group to ridicule women and black people or to present the world with a false and offensive representation of a country he’s never stepped foot in. Perhaps his main mistake was make a feature-length film based on a half-baked character that had his scant beginnings in a marginal segment on a popular TV show.
The most irritating thing about figures like Cohen is that their comedy is presented as some kind of progressive form of irony, where, it is assumed, everyone will get the joke, or in the very least, that everyone will find the joke funny. Judging from the outrage and embarrassment Borat has caused to the nation of Kazakhstan, it seems not everyone shares his humor.
49 UP
In 2003, Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier challenged his mentor Jørgen Leth, another filmmaker, to remake his 1967 short The Perfect Human five times over with different constraints on filmmaking. In doing so, Von Trier wanted to illustrate something of the human condition, concluding that the “perfect human” was simply someone who was just that: human. Around the same time that Leth made his original short, Britain’s Granada Television commissioned filmmaker Michael Apted to make the first in a series of documentaries that would span the entire life cycle of a cross-section of regular Britons, in order to get at the same question: what is it to be human? What things unite us as we travel from the cradle to the grave?
Apted started when his subjects were just 7 and continued to revisit them every seven years. 49 Up is partly the documentary that picks them up again at the age of 49 and partly an overview of each participant as his or her story has unfolded on camera over the years. Back in 1963, Apted seemed motivated by one central desire — to see if social class is something that affects his subjects throughout their lives; to see if they stick to the paths that their beginnings arguably map out for them, or as the Jesuit saying goes, to take a child at age 7, so that he might show you the man.
Some of them are from working-class homes, and some are from upper-class ones, while two of them grew up in a children’s home. For the most part, Apted’s subjects don’t do anything extraordinary with their lives, and that’s what makes his films all the more demonstrative of their humanity. Most of them follow the cycle of life — growing up and making a home for themselves, getting married and having children. Some of them turn out as you might expect, given their social class and upbringing. Some of them don’t. Perhaps the most obvious exception is Neil, who as an adult is a loner, drifting from place to place, sometimes homeless and unsure of his destiny. At 42, his life seems much improved. He is found living in London and is an active member of the Liberal Democrat Party. At 49, he has moved to Cumbria, somewhere where he feels his work for the party will have more effect. He still hasn’t found love and seems unsure as to whether he ever will. While the state of Neil’s life might be depressing to some, it is his life, and as unconventional as it is, his story is just as much a part of what it means to be human.
49 Up, as well as being the most comprehensive documentary project there has ever been, is also an important and fascinating slice of social phenomena, and Apted’s central idea — that being human, living your life, and developing into adults, whatever your shortcomings — is something extraordinary in itself.
Issue #34
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