For anyone who heretofore hadn't encountered the character on HBO, Borat Sagdiyev will need an introduction. He is one of the personas of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen on Da Ali G Show, a Kazakh TV reporter dapperly dressed in a dove-gray suit, bristlingly mustachioed, blissfully sexist, superstitiously anti-Semitic, and not yet toilet-trained (he splashes water on his face from the commode in his New York hotel room, takes a doggy-style dump in the bushes of a public park, jerks off in front of a Victoria's Secret display window, and so on), ostensibly dispatched to America to shoot a documentary for home consumption -- a built-in excuse for bad camerawork. Scripted scenes, or at any rate pre-planned scenes, primarily involving Borat's obese and camera-shy producer, Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian), secondarily involving a slightly less obese African-American call girl (Luenell), and presumably also involving the proprietors of a Jewish B&B (how can we be sure?), alternate with unscripted performance-art pieces, so to call them, in which assorted innocents, dupes, patsies, and joke-butts are lured into the gag unawares. These unrehearsed bits, no doubt more compelling, more riveting, more nerve-racking than the planned-out parts, naturally give rise to thoughts of their comedic antecedents and analogues: Candid Camera, the practical jokes on a Dick Clark Bloopers special, MTV's copycat Punk'd, the crank calls of any wisenheimer radio deejay, Andy Kaufman's chauvinist-pig wrestling career, the Yes Men (and their eponymous film of a couple of years previous), etc. At the same time, they give rise to moral concerns -- to say nothing of legal ones -- that far overshadow artistic ones. Can, as an example, an Alabama minister's wife -- bluntly insulted for her dearth of pulchritude -- be safely assumed to be less of a human being than our fearless guerrilla artiste, or has the latter's sexism perhaps crossed over, there, from fiction into reality? Any diversion afforded by such thoughts is all to the good, because the general impression of the film, right down to the spottiness of its laughs, and regardless of whether staged or not, is amazingly similar to that of your average Will Ferrell comedy. In a word, over-the-top and high of the target. Directed by Larry Charles. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd