Los Angeles - When the bogus Kazakh journalist Borat Saqdiyev undertakes a cross country road trip across America, he discovers many of the quirks of US culture.
But there's one rule not exposed in the hit comedy which is set to earn over 100 million dollars worldwide: there is nothing the press likes better than to build up stars with an avalanche of hype, then knock them down with gleeful pleasure.
So has the backlash started? There are certainly plenty of critics, and they are not the rightwing zealots whom you might expect to be livid about the film's exposure of America's nasty underbelly.
Instead they are writing in the traditional organs of leftist intelligentsia like Slate.com and The Nation - newly influential since the Democratic election victory.
They charge that Borat's creator - the Jewish-British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen - is actually promoting the anti-Semitism his edgy pranks are meant to expose.
'Those Jew jokes - why are they so funny?' asked culture expert Richard Goldstein in The Nation. 'You're left with the feeling that everyone enjoys the spectacle of bigotry, as long as it's couched in humour. The laughter is just as primitive as Borat's barbaric ways.'
Writing in Slate.com, Ron Rosenbaum said that while he was a huge fan of the 'brilliantly oblivious' Borat character seen on Cohen's TV shows, the Borat of the movie is a 'heavy-handed, frat-boy, butt-head Borat. The Jackass Borat.'
Elsewhere, in the Los Angeles Times, Joel Stein blasted journalists who went along with the joke, interviewing Cohen in character as Borat, which he said was like asking superspy Jack Bauer from the hit thriller 24, what to do about Iraq.
Other widely publicized criticism is coming from the people who were duped into appearing in the movie by Sacha Baron Cohen and his crew.
The most famous case involves two students who were shown drinking and making racist and sexist comments with Borat. They are claiming suing for damages claiming they were made 'the objects of ridicule, humiliation, mental anguish, and emotional and physical distress.'
There is little that can be done if courts uphold the comprehensive release agreement signed by all the participants in the movie. But lawyers for the students and other unwitting participants may claim that Borat's canny production crew tricked them into signing the documents. The team always turned up at the last minute, waved money in front of them and misrepresented themselves and the production.
It's not only in the US that an anti-Borat backlash is developing. In Germany the movie is facing two lawsuits alleging racial incitement while authorities in Hamburg are investigating whether the movie's dialogue could be construed as promoting white-supremacist, anti-Semitic and anti-gypsy ideology.
'We are accusing him of defamation and inciting violence against Sinti and Roma,' said Marko D Knudsen, chairman of the Antiziganism centre, which takes its name from the term for hostility towards gypsies. 'You have to remember that precisely that attitude prevailed in Germany only a couple of generations ago.'
In Russia, with its extreme ethnic tensions, the film was considered too explosive to be shown in cinemas, while in the Romanian town of Glod, where Baron Cohen filmed scenes, villagers say they were tricked and ripped off by the actor and his producers who paid them 3.30 dollars to 5.50 dollars each.
Criticism of Sacha Baron Cohen is of course nothing new. Ever since his greatest creation, Borat, first garnered attention on British and US television, the Kazakh government has loudly protested at the inaccurate impression he gives of its country.
In the US, the Anti-Defamation League, which calls itself 'the world's leading organization fighting anti-semitism,' also voiced concern about the movie. In a statement ahead of the film's release, the organization said that it understood that the movie's attempt 'to use humour to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti- Semitism'.
But it also said that 'the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.'
© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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