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Since I received my robust dose of Borat jokes over the last 14 years, let me write here my two cents regarding this beautiful artistic creation. Baron Cohen's Borat franchise is based on cynicism. 1/11
Sacha has it both ways: political satire about the US for the non-bigots and good old reinforcement of ignorant prejudice against poorer countries for the bigots. Bingo: tickets sold to both bigots and non-bigots. 2/11
The choice of Kazakhstan was not random at all, and it is instead a cynical marketing calculation. The country is (1) not strong enough to fight back (I am looking forward to seeing Sacha's fake press conferences in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington DC); 3/11
(2) not an important market for his movies; (3) not a former "Western" colony, and not even clearly framed in "race" terms in the US or the UK (incidentally, he can thus go around pretending to be a Qazaq with an American audience, when he clearly does not look like one); 4/11
(4) an existing one. The last point is important: many people from Kazakhstan keep asking why on Earth he could not just make up a country, instead of using theirs. 5/11
But provoking a weak country is a great marketing stunt: you get a lot of indirect advertising by its government furious but toothless reaction (this time, the Kazakhstani government learned the lesson and stayed quiet). 6/11
With the first movie he clearly offended millions of people from Kazakhstan. A reason for maybe *not* doing a second movie? Not at all, obviously. Contacted by the New York Times (link below), he replied: 7/11
“This is a comedy, and the Kazakhstan in the film has nothing to do with the real country. I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the U.S. knew anything about,… 8/11
…which allowed us to create a wild, comedic, fake world. The real Kazakhstan is a beautiful country with a modern, proud society — the opposite of Borat’s version.” 9/11
I am not sure what a "proud society" is, but most importantly, this kind of statement is not too different from the behaviour of tabloids' editors who make money by preying on people's privacy, and then apologise at the bottom of an internal page months later. 10/11
In any case, I am looking forward to watching the next Baron Cohen's character, a slimy guy from an African country, in blackface maybe - obviously conceived to expose white racism in the US. Unlikely? I agree. 11/11
