This Week's Art Films

Jagshemash!

I need to get something up here - weeks have passed, months, and nothing! no movie comments - nothing! alas! This despite a pretty nice run of films lately, especially in the rep houses - Kieslowski, John Huston, Cocteau, Dreyer, Mizoguchi all turning up... One of these days I have to say something about those films - but for now, let's turn to the weekend just passed, which featured 2 very much anticipated releases. I bring you - Borat and Babel!

Borat: Cultural Learnings to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Khazakhstan - the title is, in fact, almost longer than the film. This has been much hyped, especially on the web, and there was, I suppose, a good deal of potential for disappointment. High concept acts like Borat don't always translate well to longer forms - it's hard to sustain the act, it's harder to put it together into anything coherent. And I suppose this is somewhat true of the film - the plotline is old hat (Borat comes to America to make a documentary, sees Pamela Anderson on TV and heads off to California to make her his wife), and just an excuse to string together a bunch of typical Borat sequences.... still, it works. This is partly because the scenes with the plot are almost as funny as the other bits (the plot gives us Borat and his producer Azamat driving across the country in an ice cream truck with a watch bear, wrestling nude in a hotel room, then chasing each other through the hallways and elevators and into a conference, and a wonderful sick sight gag at the end) - the whole thing keeps moving and stays funny, damned funny.

Borat's act is certainly a provocative one - he's a caricature of old world/third world grotesquery, with his misogyny and racism and virulent (and ridiculous) anti-semitism - he takes this persona into situations and sees what he can provoke. A lot of it is set up as a TV crew shooting a documentary - sitting down to interview someone, taking a camera crew into a bar or store or TV station, maybe a dinner party or a revival meeting. Borat starts by acting ingratiating, then starts making offensive comments, pulling bizarre stunts - drawing reactions from people. Sometimes getting them to go along with his offensiveness, as in the famous "Throw the Jew Down the Well" song - sometimes pissing them off, like the equally famous rodeo stunt. A lot of what he gets out of people comes from their desire not to offend him: watch this segment (reworked for the film - reshot, I think), of Borat with an etiquette coach, and at a dinner - everyone tries to remain nice, as he behaves like a spoiled child... It's tempting to freight it with significance, to think he's revealing something about the fundamental depravity of the people in these segments, but I don't think that is quite right. Especially since the bits are put together after the fact - the editing can hide the extent to which the audience is on the joke, exaggerate the reactions he wants to emphasize and so on. It's tempting, too, to wonder what's "real" and what's fiction - but the point is that what we see is all fiction. Baron Cohen is staging everything - the character, the cameras, the situations he creates are all fictional before they start. His act is more about the role of the media, of media as a function in everyday life - the presence of cameras, our learned expectations about how to act on TV, about media as a cultural force - than about the underlying prejudices of people. And his act doesn't so much use reality to make fiction as point out how reality itself is fiction - normal, everyday life is a kind of collaborative improvisation, shot through with political and cultural ideas and images, a culture than speaks us. Stephanie Zacharek's excellent review in Salon notes, for example, the way Borat's character, his morality, comes straight out of folklore, with its shape-changing Jews and Gypsy tears. Borat's point, I think, is that all behavior, all morality, is rooted in things beyond us - in culture, in stories, images, ways of thinking. He turns TV into a kind of folklore... (I also think that Zacharek's comment helps explain why Borat is so appealing, despite his bad behavior (and Baron Cohen's bad behavior as well - jerking people around like that, sometimes with real consqeuences, isn't exactly admirable) - he's a figure out of a folk tale, a trickster, and tricksters are always the good guys, no matter how bad they act.)

Babel - if I were feeling perverse, I would note how much Borat has in common with films by, say, Abbas Kiarostami, or Mohsen Makhmalbaf - the mix of reality and fiction, documentary, improv, and scripted bits... I say that to segue into a more conventional art film, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu and Guillerma Arriega's latest, Babel. Which comes from a different strand of art film - actually comes pretty much uncut from Kieslowski. Babel, like their previous films, comes off a bit like 3 or 4 of the Dekalog films crammed into one film - 4 interconnected stories, told in something less than exact sequence, edited to echo one another... parents and children, lovers and strangers, those who rise to the moral challenges put to them and those who don't. It all works because Inarittu is one of the most inventive and skillful of directors - but it still feels contrived and hysterical and a bit pointless. There is no discernable reason why the stories are told out of order, except as an exercise. The situations are distressingly close to cliches. The politics is obvious and lazy - white Americans act like bastards, unless they are movie stars, and then only when one of them gets shot. Everybody else is just trying the best they can.... And there's way too much Brad Pitt and nowhere near enough Koji Yakusho.