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Boratdirected by Larry Charles, USA, 2006 genre: Satire This film features Sasha Baron Cohen, Pamela Anderson and Ken Davitian. It involves North American (USA) and Kazakh (fantasy version) cultures. The film involves Borat leaving his home in Kazakhstan to go to the "U.S. and A." and record a documentary at the behest of the fictitious Kazakh Ministry of Information. He leaves behind his mother, wife, and the town rapist, but takes along his corpulent producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian). From this point on Borat is shown interviewing and interacting with Americans who believe that he is an actual foreign TV personality with no understanding of American customs. The only continuous line of the film is that Borat has fallen in love with Pamela Anderson after seeing her in a TV- episode of "Baywatch" and from then on wanting to travel from New York to Los Angeles for "making love explosions" with her. Finally he comes face-to-face with Pamela at an autograph signing where he shows her his "traditional Kazakh marriage sack". He chases her around the store and into the shopping centre parking lot in an attempt to kidnap her, before finally being subdued by the security guards. Afterwards, Borat marries an African-American prostitute, Luenell (played by the comedian of the same name), whom he had befriended earlier in the film, and goes back to Kazakhstan with his new wife.
Additional information: The "Kazakhstan" depicted in the film has little or no relationship with the actual country. No Kazakh language is heard in the film. Several characters who seem to speak Kazakh are actually speaking Romanian. The Cyrillic alphabet used in the film is the Russian form, not the modified Kazakh one; words written in it (especially the geographical names) are either misspelled, or make no sense at all. Sasha Baron Cohen speaks Hebrew in the film, while Ken Davitian, who plays Azamat, speaks Armenian. They also use several common phrases from Slavic languages: Borat's trademark expressions "jagshemash" and "chenquieh" come from Polish (or related languages) for "How are you?" and "thank you". The police were called on Sasha Baron Cohen 91 times during the production of the film. Cohen has provided some information on the life of Borat. It is a very long and disgusting story, and sometimes overdone, as when he talks about his sister, who is regarded as the "fourth-best prostitute in Kazakhstan", and with whom he often fornicates. Borat is prejudiced against Jews, Uzbeks, and Gypsies, and calls himself a sexist and a homophobe. He has three children: 12-year-old Bilak, 12 year-old Biram (whose mother is Borat's sister, Natalya), and 13 year-old Hooeylewis (his favourite child); plus 17 grandchildren. All this information seems to be rather racist and disgusting, yet the more horrible it seems, the more surprising it is, when you have a look at Sacha Baron Cohen, the person behind Borat. Cohen is Jewish and lived in Israel for one year. He studied History at the University of Cambridge and his dissertation "The Black-Jewish Alliance: A Case of Mistaken Identity" was about coloured and Jewish minorities. But since then he has turned to comedy and invented several figures like Ali G. and Borat. As there was a lot of criticism about the way he presents Kazakhstan and about his political incorrectness, it should be noted that Cohen has stated in an interview with "Rolling Stone" magazine: "The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist - who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old." (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/sacha_baron_cohen_the_real_borat_finally_speaks/page/2)
The following scenes showing aspects of intercultural matters have been analysed:
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