The Kazakh government's handling of the Borat affair has been as farcical as the comic film itself. Yesterday, the Kazakh foreign ministry softened its tone on Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming movie, extending an invitation to their erstwhile foe. This amounts to a sizeable departure from the furious PR campaign mounted against Cohen -- which included protesting foreign ministry officials, four-page supplements in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, and a multi-million dollar epic film.
Realising perhaps that their approach smacked of the unimaginative, heavy-handed intolerance of Nursultan Nazarbayev's despotic regime, Kazakh officials are now making conciliatory noises. Rakhat Aliyev, son-in-law of premier Nazarbayev, told the media:
"We must have a sense of humour and respect other people's freedom of creativity. It's useless to offend an artist and threaten to sue him. It will only further damage the country's reputation and make Borat even more popular."
Better late than never, one supposes.
Whether Cohen decides to take up the invitation is another matter. Borat was never a character intended to walk the streets of Kazakhstan, beneath the skyscrapers of Astana. The real Kazakhstan has nothing to offer Cohen's Borat, whose humour has much more to do with the United States than the central Asian republic. One observer notes:
"As Borat travels through the country like a half-deranged, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, sex-obsessed Huell Howser, the picture that emerges is strange and strangely consistent on what defines the American national character."
