Borat: My Name A...

Dara writes:

Since I saw Sacha Baron Cohen's one-man picaresque last night, I cannot stop saying, "My name a Borat," with that intonation the comedian has. If you haven't seen the movie but are interested in language, I almost recommend the flick just to absorb Mr. Cohen's voice modulations.

Yet there are other reasons to pay (New York's) $11 and watch the film now. You don't go to the theater because this show *demands* a big screen. No. You go because you want to be talking about this when everyone else is. And Borat is worth talking about.

For those who have been under a rock, the nominal plot is this: Borat Sagdiyev, Cohen's character, is a Kazakh journalist who travels to America to learn from the country; but, when he sees Pamela Anderson on TV, he ditches his assignment and travels by ice cream truck to Malibu to woo her. Along the way, Cohen exposes feminists, southerners, racists, anti-Semites, rodeo cowboys, and Pentecostals to their own follies.

Did I say "expose"? I meant, "ripped from their hearts until the blood gushed out." Cohen is relentless. True, his targets are soft--who doesn't think southern frat boys are a menace--but the results are no less excruciating. Borat meets the frat boys when he is hitch-hiking and they pick him up in their Winnebago. Already in a miasmic state of drunkenness, one of the boys immediately asks the foreigner how the "bitches" are in Kazakhstan, and if Borat has his way with them (he uses grosser language) and then never calls them. The frat boy is horrible, but Borat's response is, "And why you not call--because the women don't have telephones, right?" To which the frat guy insists, "Nah! Because you don't respect them." Cohen is miraculous at not only getting suckers to dig themselves into a hole, but then, at his suggestion they haven't dug deep enough, to get them to dig in the mud for ten more feet.

One of the other boys in this scene complains how "minorities" in the U.S. have "all the power, especially the Jews." It chills me to hear this, because it's essentially what all Jews secretly fear; that when we're not around (or when we are, or when people don't *think* we're around), our fellow Americans excoriate us.

Cohen portrays Borat as a vicious anti-Semite who thinks Jews have horns, shape-shift, and, when he ends up at a Bed and Breakfast run by an old Jewish couple, that Jews are out to poison him. Cohen makes Borat adopt this role so that he may expose the vicious anti-Semitism apparently lurking beneath every genteel American face. Cohen occupies himself with this task presumably because he his Jewish, and in fact grew up Orthodox in an England where, I'm sure, especially in the upper echelons--Cambridge, and the like--of which Mr. Cohen was a part, long-standing anti-Semitism was quite out in the open.

Cohen is angry. He is hostile. He is a terrible bully. Terrible. The kind I would not want to run into in a schoolyard. And yet, his aggressiveness is precisely what makes him so remarkable. In American culture, there are certain stereotypes about Jews: we are bookish, we are effeminate, we read, we ingratiate ourselves in order to assimilate as well as possible. If members of another minority group do something reprehensible--certain Columbia professors' inhibiting of pro-Israeli opinions from entering their classroom, for example--Jews are sometimes the last to respond, as the fear is this: next time it will be us. At least among my immigrant ancestors, there was a sense, "don't rock the boat."

Sacha Baron Cohen sinks the Titanic. He is in-your-face, he is mean and cruel and sadistic. He is loud and obtrusive. Even physically he has attributes we don't associate with Jews: he is incredibly tall and imposing. Bookish--NOT! Just as Borat exposes the folly of stereotypes, the very person of Sacha Cohen is a subversion.

I did not stop laughing for the first 45 minutes of the movie. As the story got more serious, I stopped holding my side, and in the climax when Borat tries to kidnap Pam Anderson at a book-signing she gives in a California Virgin megastore, I felt incredibly badly for the Baywatch star, who seemed tragically shocked. Despite this and a few other gaffes, I laud Mr. Cohen's pranks.

In Kubrick we trust

Leave it to the Kafka of filmmakers to submit this stunning image as an anti-war icon: a man in a gurney, unconscious and near death, propped up to be assassinated by firing squad. Do the French have no mercy? In "Paths of Glory," Kubrick's 1957 investigation of the folly of WWI, the filmmaker succeeds in communicating the severe issues involved with commanding combat. Basically, the idealist/pessimist Kubrick decides that the aristocratic generals are Machiavellian with only their own reputations in mind.

There's a brilliant court martial scene in which Kubrick zeroes in on the men’s faces in a way right out of "Clockwork Orange." The "trial" takes place in this magnificent chateau whose gleaming white and black tiles made me think of Dylan's line about the “geometry of innocent flesh on the bone.” Bascially, an officious general sends his men on an impossible mission only to enhance his credentials. I won't say more, but let's just say all that stands between evil and justice is Kirk Douglas' chin. That guy has a great demeanor and a fantastically flinty voice that still conveys integrity. Also, with his cleft chin and slick hair and small stature, he embodies the French soldier he’s supposed to portray.

The evil general intones, “There’s nothing like watching someone die to inspire a soldier to do his duty.” Trust Kubrick for this over-the-top language that uses absurdity to communicate a very sober point.

War is hell. So thought most of the audience, who seemed very stirred up. Mr. Right and I saw the film at the National Arts Club. The screening was thrown by the film committee, the head of which took a mike after the screening and asked people their thoughts. She saw parallels with "our current situation." She's a pacifist who's against war for any reason. Others didn't agree and when things turned heated, she backed out, "I don't want to get into this." But she already had.

I admire people who get stirred up by movies.

Le film, c'est moi.

Hot Orthodox Sex

Last night I went to the NY premiere of the new French film, "La Petite Jerusalem," at the 15th Annual NY Jewish Film Festival at the Walter Reade. The film suffered from the classic pitfalls of French film-making: too much flesh, too many endless (and pointless) stares between characters, too much self-seriousness.

Now don't get me wrong. I love French film. I love the language, I love the themes. Rohmer's a favorite, but Truffaut is too; I could take or leave Godard. This latest, from filmmaker Karin Albou, had no traction. Even after it got going, it mostly offered stills of breasts, necks, and eyebrows. And all the carnality boiled down to the auteur's desire to convince a lay audience that: Religious People Have Sex Too. A lot of it. Constantly. Isn't that controversial, not to say titillating?

Problem is, when their religion--or Kant's philosophy, as in the protagonist's case--restricts their desires to the point when the bursting affection is likely to shower upon the most proximate target, even if that bulls-eye is creepy, older, downright homely, and with a mustache that would have made Tom Selleck in the '70s blush.

So I didn't have the most favorable opinion of the movie. But a woman in the audience in the Q&A after the screening did. The director subjected herself to the audience's response. First though, she told us that she wanted to leave some crucial questions unanswered so that the audience could find its own interpretation, its own moral. A wide-eyed fan raised her hand and began: "I love this film. What a treat to be here with you. Let me ask you one thing: what's your message to us."

Groans, even laughter from other theater-goers. A grandmotherly type with a Long-Island accent feels impelled to intervene: "She just said, she _doesn't_ _have_ _a_ _message_."

I love it when an audience question is so obtuse even the other audience members get indignant. That means the question has reach a new height of banality--or was that the film that provoked the question?