By now you will have heard and read enough about Sasha Baron Cohen’s film Borat to decide whether you want to see it or not.  In this film Cohen, as a brash television reporter from Kazakhstan with some kind of totally idiotic accent, pounces on unsuspecting bystanders in the best “Candid Camera” tradition and bombards them with outrageous questions.  As an explorer bent on learning about America, he is Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce, and Archie Bunker, only goofier, filthier, and more virulently prejudiced; he is also hilarious.

You will have to laugh at his uninhibited antics: chasing strangers down the streets of New York to “kiss them hello” in the best Kazakhstani tradition, for example.  But be warned: at some points in this rambling odyssey you will be outraged, revolted, and disgusted, depending on your particular tolerance level for outrageous, revolting, and disgusting behavior.  For Borat is obsessed with sex and delights in potty humor.  (At one point he leaves the table at a fancy dinner party to go to the bathroom, then returns with his feces wrapped in a handkerchief to ask the assembled guests what he should do with it).  There is also an obscene naked wrestling match with a grotesquely obese, troll-like man that will leave you gagging.

Cohen himself is Jewish, but as Borat he is a raging anti-Semite.  Some of it, if you can stand it, is actually funny, as when he confronts a red-neck gun dealer and asks for a nice little gun “for to kill Jews with.”  The humor is in the serious way that his victims respond, trying not to be as offensive as he.  And Borat’s earnest put-ons reveal the rampant hypocrisy in people who are caught unawares and are trying to be “nice," no matter what.

Not all of Cohen’s encounters are offensive, however.  There is much in this film to laugh at.  Borat is an innocent abroad, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, and confounded by a puzzling America that, to him, is the be-all and end-all of Kazakhstani aspiration.

Sasha Baron Cohen is a uniquely funny man who never abandons his quirky persona and never plays to the camera.  He has made a very original movie and he plays it straight.  I just wanted to give you a heads-up.