During the vision of the movie, I was a little bit disturbed by it; but at the end I felt really disgusted.
I went out of the class and I smoked. In my mind, all the vulgar pictures; the mix of everything was horrible, unacceptable and leave me completely astonished.
I have to precise that my reaction wasn’t for the character of Borat; he is just an idiot, and, what’s the most important, he’s an actor, he did everything on purpose; the other people who are involved in the movie were, still, “real”, not paid performers.
Actually, I’m not sure if they weren’t acting at all. There are some strange, suspicious scenes. Especially, no one asked anything about the video camera, no one asked not to film. In the antique shop, the seller gave no evidence he had noticed the camera; I think that’s quite impossible. A normal effect to Borat behaviour would lead to, at least, an help request to anyone present. Another eloquent scene is the one in which a group of boys gave Borat a lift: it’s weird they didn’t ask anything about the camera, in any case for curiosity. All that sounds unrealistic. I should admit that maybe the guys were behaving so crazy just because of the camera, finding it “cool”.
Assuming all them weren’t acting, the behaviours were incredible. I was really shocked by the rodeo scene: Borat yelled against terrorism, inciting cruel actions such as “May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman and child of Iraq! May you destroy their country so that for the next thousand years not even a single lizard will survive in their desert”. The reaction of the public was cheering! That’s a lot over the acceptable limit.
If we concentrate on Borat’s features, we can easily detect lots of deplorable attitudes, such as misogynism, anti-semitism, antiziganism. That, added to his ignorance and rudeness, make him so odious. What’s curious, this movie obtained a great success of public: almost everyone has, at least, heard about it. I cannot understand it. After almost a week, I don’t feel Borat is a good film. After thinking about it with a clearer mind, I’m more convinced that is completely useless.
He broke the barriers of television and the conventional rules in the film-making. However, why? And, moreover, why did he focus on the “bad” things? How is it possible that he gained so much profit by this trash-movie? I don’t think the media needed more and more vulgarity.
Cecilia Astolfi
