Written by Elise Mullen, Image courtesy of Amazon Studios
“People make mistakes,” says the Kazastahn President.
This year has been unprecedented, to say the least. Routines have been thrown out the window and any sense of normalcy we thought we had is gone. Regardless, we are all trying the best we can given the information we are presented with.
Borat, the (humorously fictional) Kazastahn journalist, who rose to fame after his first film in 2006, is back, now being released from prison after fourteen years. His new mission is to present American government officials with a gift in an exciting, yet potentially life-threatening, trip to the “U.S and A”, as he puts it. With his objective in mind, he grabs his Michael Mouse pajamas and is off to America.
You can imagine his shock when he arrives in 2020 America after being essentially under a rock for over a decade; Coronavirus and Presidential elections are just the beginning. The comedic tone in this movie is what makes this film so relatable to the current climate. Borat touches on major societal problems and gets them, well, just about right. Does it simply make a joke out of everything, or is this where we are as a country? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
While some jokes set us back in time, naturally fourteen years in prison will do that, we see another storyline develop when we are introduced to Borat’s fifteen-year-old daughter. It is through her progressive character development that we see the sense of hope this world has been desperately trying to grasp. Although that storyline develops slowly under Borat’s mockery of Americans, that message is not lost on us.
Over the past several months, our lives have been flipped upside down. Some lost their jobs, some haven’t been able to hug family members since New Year’s. I have had such recent misfortune in a canceled trip abroad followed by a senior year of college spent entirely in my childhood bedroom. It is overwhelming. But even in the most uncertain and divided times, we are all looking for that sigh of relief, that sense of hope.
It is refreshing to pull away from the unrest of society for 90 minutes and have a laugh. Despite being a comedy, it is no less a reminder of the madness of our world. I try to live with the mindset of taking one day at a time, just do what you can do and do it the best you can. At the end of the day, there will be setbacks, there will be political and societal differences, there will be hate and there will be defeats. But it is important to remember that despite all of that, we are all human. And as the Kazastahn President says in the film, “People make mistakes.”
