Like everyone else at the Toronto International Film Festival this September, actress Nandita Das too had heard of the film with the really long title, Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. She had heard the film was extremely vulgar, impossibly shocking, endlessly sexist and rather racist. I think she skipped the film, preferring to see a Werner Herzog film instead.
But most of us who managed to get to into the theater for the world premiere, beating the long lines for the press and industry screenings were hysterical. We could not but agree that Borat was outrageous but whether it was racist or sexist was left to breakfast and barroom discussions the next day. Some of us were giddy with excitement as we took some time to be on our own so that we could rerun the jokes in our minds.
On Friday November 3, 20th Century Fox, the American distributor for the British film, unsure how audiences would react to this low-budget road adventure, opened it in some 830 theaters and were startled to find that the film went through the roof, grossing $26 million, and handily beating fellow newcomers The Santa Clause 3 and Flushed Away. Each of those films were in some 3000 theaters, and each earned about $20 million.
Borat's per screen average was $31,000, and it broke the record for highest per-theater average for a film opening between 800 and 900 theaters, according to industry sources.
Next week, Fox is unleashing Borat in an additional 1500 theaters. Expect it to set another record. The movie made for $18 million (and with some $10 million spent on its publicity) will be profitable by its first week when its foreign returns (about $17 million over the weekend) are factored in. Very few films recover their production cost in the first week.
"This picture was playing to full houses," Bruce Snyder, head of distribution at Fox told reporters. "The planets aligned, the moons aligned, the stars aligned, and everything came together perfectly for us."
The film stars British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who found a cult following with his Ali G Show. Last seen (and wildly appreciated) in Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby with Will Ferrell, the new film features one of the alter egos he made famous while as Ali G.
Borat Sagdiyev, the sixth most famous reporter in Kazakhstan, is an ill-mannered boor who has no hesitation in talking about incest in his family, his child bride, or defecating and washing his underwear in public.
Kazakhstanis are upset with the film, and are likely to ban it; Russians have already banned it, worrying that residents from the Central Asian countries will take offence. But Kazakhstanis really don't have to worry. No one should takes the bizarre exploits of Borat seriously. And intelligent viewers will recognize that the satire spares no one.
While Borat's behavior reeks of blatant sexism, it seems indeed mild and less offensive compared to the action of many Americans he confronts, especially in the South and in one particular scene, when he goes around shopping for a gun to deal with Jews.
But controversy doesn't ensure success. For instance, the Toronto sensation Death of a President that revolves around the aftermath of a hypothetical George W Bush assassination in the year 2007 died an instantaneous death in American movie theaters last week.
This one, on the other hand, is a sensation. Borat, which may well be rated among the crudest films of all time, is also making many critics sick with laughter. And it has emerged as one of the best reviewed films of the year, though its chances of getting an Oscar nomination seem laughable. Hollywood doesn't usually let even chaste comedies clutter up its red carpet.
'Borat maneuvers himself into situations with average Americans -- feminists, churchgoers, frat boys, politicians -- and unloads one frag-bomb of political incorrectness after another,' Ty Burr wrote in Boston Globe. 'All he asks is that we show ourselves to him in our open-hearted, bigoted glory.'
'The enlightened cynicism of H L Mencken and Jonathan Swift courses through this movie's veins, along with the social curiosity of Alexis de Tocqueville, the scientific eye of a wildlife biologist,' Burr added, 'and a great comedian's love of the unspeakably juvenile.'
And in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis, admittedly not a big fan of comedies, simply gushed: "The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy."
As for me, having seen the film twice already, I am getting ready to laugh my guts out the third time, even though I'll have to buy a ticket now. Not that I'm trying to compete with New York Post critic Lou Lumenick who begins his review with "I can't wait to see Borat, which has twice as many laughs as all of this year's other movie comedies combined, for a fourth time."
It is just that good. And now that even women critics are applauding the film, Nandita Das might want to try it out after all.
