Jagshemash! How Will New ‘Borat’ Go Over in His ‘Homeland’?

Borat’s back … very nice! Or is it?

Along with assorted Republican operatives, open racists and others left red-faced (or clothing askew) after encounters with British actor Sasha Baron Cohen in disguise, there’s another group likely bracing for Friday’s Amazon streaming debut of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”

Entire glorious nation of Kazakhstan!

The original “Borat,” which premiered in 2006 and followed the eponymous character on his journey through America, portrayed his home country as a squalid hellhole of simple-minded misogynists bent on incest and anti-Jewish pogroms. The Central Asian country—which was aiming for a higher global profile 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union—reacted with fury: lodging official protests, placing a four-page ad in The New York Times defending Kazakhstan and banning the movie. Worldwide, the satire was better received, grossing over $262 million. 

In the new film, Kazakhstan—at least Baron-Cohen’s fantastical version of it—continues to take its lumps; Borat has been released from the gulag to which he was sentenced for humiliating the country and dispatched again to America in an attempt by the government to bribe the Trump administration (with Borat’s daughter as payment). 

Maryland Today reached out to history Associate Professor Sarah Cameron, a historian of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras who has written a book about a 1930s famine engineered by Josef Stalin’s regime that killed perhaps one-fourth of Kazakhstan’s population; and Naina Tsarni ’22, a Russian major who was born and raised in the country’s largest city, Almaty.

The question: Is Kazakhstan ready for Borat in 2020? Here’s what they told us.

Kazakhstanis get the joke. 
The first movie ignited disgust and outrage, but people in Kazakhstan soon realized the intended target, Cameron said. “The movie was actually helpful and useful to show how deeply ingrained racism and ignorance of other cultures around the world is in the United States,” she said.

Cameron doesn’t entirely let the first film off the hook, however: “You could argue there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy here—doing that and showing the ignorance that exists by employing stereotypes for comedy.”

Tsarni, who first saw the film after moving to the United States with her family, said it’s easy to understand how film initially gave offense—but it’s too cartoonish to be truly insulting.

“I think we take it a bit more lightly now,” she said. 

The Kazakhstan of “Borat” is not based on Kazakhstan. 
Baron Cohen’s portrayal isn’t a skewed view or even a hostile take. From the races of people portrayed in crowd scenes to their food and drink to games they play, it has nothing to do with the real nation. Scenes from the original movie portraying Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania, while Borat himself is a pastiche of post-Soviet clichés, and speaks a made-up mishmash stemming from Polish and Hebrew.

The crazed anti-Semitism of the earlier film’s “Running of the Jew” sequence, or a singalong Borat leads in a bar in Tucson, Ariz., meanwhile, is inaccurate, according to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, which tried to correct the record soon after the release of “Borat”: “Anti-Semitism is not prevalent in Kazakhstan and rare incidents are reported in the press. None have been reported in the last two years.”

Baron Cohen could have spared some hurt feelings—and most people in the West would have been none the wiser—if he’d simply invented a new “-stan,” Cameron said.

“Borat” bestowed benefits—maybe.
Some who enjoyed the film later ended up enjoying the actual country, Cameron said. “These aren’t the people deciding whether to spend a week in Paris or London, but more the kind of adventure traveler who wants to get out and see unfamiliar parts of the world.”

The surge helped even Kazakhstan’s government see the beauty of “Borat,” with the country’s foreign minister in 2012 thanking the film for helping spur a tenfold increase in applications for tourist visas.

Tsarni’s not sure “Borat” can take all the credit for attracting foreigners to the Central Asian republic: “The country is getting more exposure in the world—its sports teams are competing around the world; it’s developing its business and industry.” 

The country will be mostly silent on “Borat” this time around.
Don’t look for the explosion of outrage that actually fueled “Borat” marketing, Cameron said. “I think even if people are offended, the reaction is going to be just to try and ignore it,” she said.

And for those in Kazakhstan who are not offended? “Honestly, I think a lot of people are going to find it funny,” Tsarni said.