The Kazakhstanis are up in arms over Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, and with good reason. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is unabashedly rude, crude and offensive stuff, and some of its prime barbs are aimed squarely at the good citizens of Kazakhstan.
It should also be noted — and here’s the rub — that this is one of the funniest movies you may ever have the good fortune to see.
Borat is actually an equal opportunity offender, with all races, creeds and colors skewered with gleeful, nondiscriminate abandon — and if you have a problem with that, then this is probably not the movie for you. The jokes, frequently designed to embarrass or shock as much as delight, are so organically rooted in human prejudices that some of us might be hard pressed to even acknowledge them as “jokes.” There’s plenty of scatological humor and unattractive flesh on display, too, with sight gags that assault our tender sensibilities in a brazenly tasteless manner that wouldn’t be all that out of place in Jackass 2.
Never fear, though: In the realm of comedy-as-pain, Borat is the Citizen Kane of the Jackass 2 crowd.
And, as the old cliché goes, a large part of the reason that this movie is so unspeakably funny is because it’s true. More or less.
A subversive mockumentary after the style of Christopher Guest (but pound-for-pound funnier), Borat is a road trip across America in which many of the key players appear bizarrely unaware that they’re participants in a massive hoax. Our guide is Cohen himself, adopting the persona of a clueless Kazakh journalist named Borat Sagdivev (a recurring character from his Da Ali G Show) who travels coast to coast in a feces-smeared ice cream truck, ostensibly in an effort to see what makes this country tick. His journey begins in New York (where he narrowly avoids being murdered by strangers he greets with kisses), encompasses close encounters with locals at rodeos, gun shops and Pentecostal meetings and concludes in California, where he stalks the American Dream in the monumentally artificial form of Pam Anderson.
A typical Kazakh (which is to say, Cohen’s lampooning of otherness manifested as a “typical” Kazakh), Borat is a sweetly contemptible, hygienically challenged moron, a product of a decimated, inbred environment with a rabid fear of Jews, independent women, homosexuals and virtually anything else that moves. Borat plays into just about every conceivable stereotype, and half the fun of the movie is watching the reactions of the people he encounters, many of them presumably ignorant of the fact that he’s an actor playing a part. Some of these people react to Borat’s wildly inappropriate words and deeds in stunned revulsion, others with disturbing affection, but either way the results are as spontaneous as they are hilarious.
Director Larry Charles (of Seinfeld fame, as well as the underrated Masked and Anonymous) tops off the illusion by giving the film a wonderfully amateurish non-style, with just the sort of sub-zero production values that might have been managed by an actual, woefully incompetent Kazakh film crew. By the end, my sides were aching from laughter to the point where I really began to appreciate the handful of brief, relatively subdued interludes that punctuate the nearly nonstop chaos. Like a solid B-side after a long string of hit singles, Borat‘s sprinkling of “serious” moments gives us a second to catch our breath and keeps this ridiculously funny movie from completely spinning off into the stratosphere.
Enthusiastically impolite though it is, however, Borat is not the most provocative movie opening in town this week. That dubious honor goes to Shortbus, a ready-made hot-button that’s sure to offend more than its fair share of viewers, although in ways altogether different from the absurdisms heaped on by Borat.
Shortbus is the new film by Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell and, though it is clearly the work of a serious auteur, it is absolutely crammed to the gills with full-on, no-faking-it sex. We’re talking in-your-face, hardcore fucking — raging genitalia, penetration, oral, anal, the whole nine, nasty yards.
You know where you stand with Shortbus within the movie’s first 10 minutes, as various characters are introduced to us while copulating their brains out (culminating in a veritable fireworks display of erupting love juices). There will surely be those who feel compelled to flee the theater at the earliest opportunity, maybe right about the time of the soon-to-be-infamous auto-fellatio scene — but that would be a pity. Leave early and you risk missing something priceless, like the camera lingering lovingly on a blob of jism dripping down a Jackson Pollock painting. (Insert your own joke about organic brush strokes here.)
Sex isn’t just sex in Shortbus, though; it’s a reflection of how people relate to one another and a metaphor for, well, just about everything. The film gives us a sprawling, Altman-esque weave of story strands, all linked by matters of the flesh and punctuated by a series of electrical brown-outs. (Mitchell sets the movie in New York, that most conspicuous of energy consumers, where “everybody still comes to get fucked.”) When the film’s infinitely permeable characters are in emotional pain or crisis, the city lights flutter and shut down; when connections are made or, more significantly, orgasm achieved, all of Manhattan comes alive in a burst of splendid luminescence.
We get Jamie and Jamie (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy), a gay couple considering adding a third partner to their relationship; Severin (Lindsay Beamish), an alienated dominatrix whose real name provides one of the movie’s best jokes; and Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), a sex therapist whose dark secret is that she’s never had an orgasm (making her the dictionary definition of the old line about those who can, do; those who can’t, teach). Eventually, everyone winds up at the titular Shortbus, an experimental urban salon where the movie’s characters talk about sex, think about sex and, most of all, have sex, constantly and in a dizzying assortment of variations.
Elaborate monologues segue into carnal gymnastics and sometimes the monologues even occur during the rubbing and ramming, almost as if the movie were being beamed in from a parallel universe where Eric Rohmer makes porn.
But the effect is not a completely happy one. Where Rohmer imbued his people with nuances and natural vitality, the characters in Shortbus too often feel curiously artificial and underwritten, too clearly mouthpieces for the movie’s big ideas about the centrality of sex in the grand scheme of things.
This is, in its way, an enormously ambitious movie, and one that uses style to some pretty outrageous ends, but Shortbus is ultimately a more distancing experience than its hot and sweaty premise would suggest. The spirit is willing but the film is weak where it counts the most, populated by characters neither as engaging nor as richly imagined as the steamy couplings, triplings and quadruplings in which they participate.
A little of this goes a long way and, in the end, all the individual, fornicating humans seem to blur together into one indistinguishable mass, like copulating snails or maybe a bunch of lava lamps, to the point where all that sex winds up becoming a little — dare I say it? — boring.
This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2006.
