Watching Borat in Prague
One of the interesting things about films is the way that our response can be affected by the circumstances in which we watch them. I don't mean whether there are noisy distractions or the tv is small or the cinema screen grand, but rather the awareness we have of the place of the film within our daily lives.
I watched Borat in a new cinema in a dormitory-like suburb of Prague. There were perhaps twenty-five or thirty people in the auditorium, who, like myself, had paid the knock-down price the cinema is offering to get its audience numbers up.
The new shopping centre in which the cinema is located is itself struggling- the dormitory dwellers don't know what to make of the idea of leisuring in their locale after decades of getting on the bus for all but basic needs.
It was into this tepid water that Borat rather embarrassingly plunged. It had me in full "what will my family think" mode- by which I mean that whenever a film seems starkly out of place it conjures those moments long-gone when family viewing as having a guest in the corner of the living room was replaced by the sensation of having an invader jabbering from a box in our personal space who would soon need ejecting by full force of button pressure.
Yet paradoxically Borat isn't the kind of film that would have got the automatic switch off in the house I grew up in. We didn't switch off clever programmes, only banal ones.
It's been funny seeing all the critics try to put their finger on what Borat's real targets are. Some take offense at the outrageous sexism, gay-bashing and Jew-hating nature of the language. Others hyperventilate over the people who are the butts of Cohen's pranks, characterising it as an assault on the American heartland by a Cambridge educated British Jew.
In places Borat is quite funny, yet the humour is much more obscure than it looks.
A semitic looking gangly rube heads into a stiff upper class dinner party and remarks favourably on the appearance of a guest's wife, while slighting his host's, and then after more and more outrageous behaviour orders a fat black prostitute using the host's phone. The reactions of the dinner party aren't stupid at any time. If Borat had cracked an out of character smile the penny would have dropped. Yet without this epiphany the action moves on to the inevitable arrival of the police car.
It's the clockwork-like nature of the drama (and Borat always creates drama), and the way the players in the drama are so smoothly and predictably wound up.
I laughed quite a bit at Borat. I even laughed when I was offended- for example when Borat, early on in the film, stands outside a highstreet window making obviously faked masturbatory motions to the dummys in the dressed window.
Somehow, amidst all this mahem of social etiquette eschewed, I was satisfied that an intelligent mind was behind it all.
What was the lesson? That question has been buzzing around me ever since I saw Borat. I wanted to dismiss the question as naive, but couldn't. It seems to me, upon consideration, just at this moment while writing, that Borat walked a line between satiricising savage youth and savaging undercooked maturity. Social norms are no certain guides to judgement and maturity, but savagery is not at all quaint.
A good message, if difficult.
I watched Borat in a new cinema in a dormitory-like suburb of Prague. There were perhaps twenty-five or thirty people in the auditorium, who, like myself, had paid the knock-down price the cinema is offering to get its audience numbers up.
The new shopping centre in which the cinema is located is itself struggling- the dormitory dwellers don't know what to make of the idea of leisuring in their locale after decades of getting on the bus for all but basic needs.
It was into this tepid water that Borat rather embarrassingly plunged. It had me in full "what will my family think" mode- by which I mean that whenever a film seems starkly out of place it conjures those moments long-gone when family viewing as having a guest in the corner of the living room was replaced by the sensation of having an invader jabbering from a box in our personal space who would soon need ejecting by full force of button pressure.
Yet paradoxically Borat isn't the kind of film that would have got the automatic switch off in the house I grew up in. We didn't switch off clever programmes, only banal ones.
It's been funny seeing all the critics try to put their finger on what Borat's real targets are. Some take offense at the outrageous sexism, gay-bashing and Jew-hating nature of the language. Others hyperventilate over the people who are the butts of Cohen's pranks, characterising it as an assault on the American heartland by a Cambridge educated British Jew.
In places Borat is quite funny, yet the humour is much more obscure than it looks.
A semitic looking gangly rube heads into a stiff upper class dinner party and remarks favourably on the appearance of a guest's wife, while slighting his host's, and then after more and more outrageous behaviour orders a fat black prostitute using the host's phone. The reactions of the dinner party aren't stupid at any time. If Borat had cracked an out of character smile the penny would have dropped. Yet without this epiphany the action moves on to the inevitable arrival of the police car.
It's the clockwork-like nature of the drama (and Borat always creates drama), and the way the players in the drama are so smoothly and predictably wound up.
I laughed quite a bit at Borat. I even laughed when I was offended- for example when Borat, early on in the film, stands outside a highstreet window making obviously faked masturbatory motions to the dummys in the dressed window.
Somehow, amidst all this mahem of social etiquette eschewed, I was satisfied that an intelligent mind was behind it all.
What was the lesson? That question has been buzzing around me ever since I saw Borat. I wanted to dismiss the question as naive, but couldn't. It seems to me, upon consideration, just at this moment while writing, that Borat walked a line between satiricising savage youth and savaging undercooked maturity. Social norms are no certain guides to judgement and maturity, but savagery is not at all quaint.
A good message, if difficult.
