Daily Archives: January 26, 2024

But what about the people of Kazakhstan? [Chicago Reader blog post, 12/23/06]

Posted By on 12.23.06 at 06:46 PM

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I’d like to ask some of the fans of Borat to explain something to me. I keep reading that this movie is a sly (or not so sly) critique of racism and intolerance based on ignorance, but Sacha Baron Cohen’s apparent semi-ignorant intolerance of the Kazakhs is almost always factored out of the discussion. It’s pretty easy to paint them as a pack of pathetic anti-Semites if you know nothing about them, but isn’t that the kind of glibness Borat is supposedly attacking?

Michael Moore has often been accused of a similar kind of one-upmanship, and with some justification, but why does the even less analytical Cohen get a free ride when he appeals to the same base impulses of the audience? The fact that, as recently revealed, he has the villagers of Kazakhstan speaking Hebrew suggests that maybe he’s enjoying a joke on his more “knowing” spectators as well as his more obvious on-screen targets. But I honestly don’t know what sort of thought — if any — lies behind his use of Kazakhstan or the choice of Hebrew. John Tierney in the New York Times (subscription required) has aptly pointed out that he always could have made Borat a citizen of an invented country instead.

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Code Unknown

From the Chicago Reader (June 28, 2002). — J.R.

CODE UNKNOWN

Aptly subtitled “Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys,” the fifth feature by Austrian director Michael Haneke (2000, 117 min.), his best to date, is a procession of long virtuoso takes that typically begin and end in the middle of actions or sentences, constituting not only an interactive jigsaw puzzle but a thrilling narrative experiment comparable to Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, and Rob Tregenza’s Talking to Strangers. The film’s second episode is a nine-minute street scene involving an altercation between an actress (Juliette Binoche in a powerful performance), her boyfriend’s younger brother, an African music teacher who works with deaf-mute students, and a woman beggar from Romania; the other episodes effect a kind of narrative dispersal of these characters and some of their relatives across time and space. I couldn’t always keep up with what was happening, but I was never bored, and the questions raised reflect the mysteries of everyday life. This is Haneke’s first feature made in France, and the title refers to the pass codes used to enter houses and apartment buildings in Paris — a metaphor for codes that might crack certain global and ethical issues. Read more