KEY POINTS:
The Russian Club, around the back of a restaurant in Newmarket, Auckland, is the kind of place Borat Sagdiyev would be very much at home. Lurid light bounces off a mirror ball and plays on the couches and curtains.
On the dance floor, a tall, moustachioed man could
very easily make a fool of himself by disco-jiving extravagantly in a too-small, blue-grey suit.
Borat might be welcome at the club, where immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Union gather and converse in Russian. But Borat's alter-ego and creator, English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, would surely have a bit of explaining to do.
His film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which opened in theatres this week, has launched the gangly television character's big-screen career. But it has offended at least some of the more than 16 million natives of Kazakhstan, the massive central Asian republic that the title character ostensibly hails from.
Borat - a cringe-inducing mixture of racism, sexism, homophobia and social ineptitude - is intended as a parody, of course, and also as a sort of comic guerrilla who tricks his targets into revealing the hideous attributes he pretends to embody. But not everybody's laughing.
The Kazakh Government went so far as to take out advertisements in the New York Times condemning Borat as "a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is incompatible with the ethics and civilised behaviour of Kazakhstan's people".
In the Russian club, over glasses of robust Georgian red wine, Andrei Goubarev and Vadim Novikov tell me they actually found the film quite funny. They liked the naked wrestling scene - surely the most appalling moment in a film full of them - and Goubarev assures me Kazakhs are very good wrestlers. The bits where Borat gets stuck into mothers-in-law and feminists particularly tickled them.
Goubarev, 27, and Novikov, 31, regard Kazakhstan as home. Even though they are ethnically Russian, they grew up in the world's ninth-biggest country that stretches across all of Central Asia. "It's our motherland," says Novikov.
They reckon the only truly offensive moments in the film come near the beginning, when Borat ridicules his mother and kisses a young woman called Natalya before introducing her as his sister and "number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan".
"Saying his sister is a prostitute," he says, "in any nation you would find this really offensive."
I suggest to him that most New Zealanders would regard bestiality as pretty poor form but never get offended when Australians make cracks about sheep-shagging.
"Well, maybe it is because Kazakhstan is a mainly Muslim culture and respect for mothers and sisters is stronger than in other cultures," says Novikov.
Cohen has said that he made Borat Kazakh "because it was a country no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. The joke is on people who can think that the Kazakhstan I describe can exist."
Goubarev and Novikov take the point, noting that the country depicted in the film's opening scenes looks nothing like theirs (it was shot in Romania) and none of the characters speaks Kazakh: Borat's greeting is in Croatian, he speaks in snatches of Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish and his offsider Azamat speaks in Armenian.
"But why choose Kazakhstan?" Novikov asks. "Why didn't he make it about a non-existent country and call it Berbistan or something like that."
He detects a geopolitical conspiracy here because Kazakhstan has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia against George W Bush. But since the film's most obvious target is actually America, that's hard to argue.
The pair happily offer assurances that Kazakh cars aren't horse-drawn like Borat's. "You can find more Mercs there than in Auckland," Goubarev says. And no, he says, he is not in the habit of giving his sister deep tongue kisses. "I kiss her as my sister," he says. "That's it."