It seems that Kazakhstan has finally learned to laugh at Borat, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's comic character whose oafish antics amused western moviegoers when he hit the big screen in 2006. Kazakh director Erkin Rakishev says he’s going to ride the wave of success enjoyed by Cohen’s mock-umentary, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and make his own movie that might just have the last laugh on Borat.
“We want to ride on the success of Borat,” Rakishev told the state-owned broadsheet Kazakhstanskaya Pravda. “Using the popularity of the movie in the West, on this wave [of success] we’ll show the foreign audience the true Kazakhstan, not the one dreamed up by Sacha Baron Cohen.”
The new film, My Brother Borat, will show a more flattering picture of the Kazakhs than that portrayed by Cohen, who went around the United States in the guise of a Kazakh journalist shocking people with his outrageous behavior.
The movie’s ironic intent passed most Kazakhs by. Not many were amused by the comedian’s lampooning of them as a bunch of ignorant, racist, sexist peasants. The people of Kazakhstan, from government officials down to the man in the street, were disgusted at being singled out as the butt of Cohen’s sometimes downright crude humor.
Not that many people in Kazakhstan had actually seen Cultural Learnings -- distributors refused to show the movie in the country on grounds of taste.
Now Rakishev’s going to set the record straight with My Brother Borat, due for release next spring. The plot centers on an “average American” called John finding Cohen’s film so hilarious that he decides to pay a visit to Borat’s homeland to see it with his own eyes.
“When he gets to Kazakhstan, he’s very surprised -- everything’s not as it is in the movie,” Rakishev explained. “In his search for the ‘truth’ the American seeks out the younger brother of the ‘Kazakh journalist’ Borat.”
Borat’s brother turns out to be having treatment in a psychiatric hospital, but John springs him and the two set off on a crazy trip around Kazakhstan to track Borat down in his hometown of Kusek, which doesn’t actually exist.
When they eventually locate Kusek, it turns out to be in another (as yet unnamed) country. There’s a twist when they find Borat: it transpires that this buffoon’s no Kazakh after all -- Borat’s actually an Englishman, and the Kazakhs have the last laugh on Cohen.
Joanna Lillis is a journalist based in Almaty and author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.
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