Battle of the boer(at)s?

More than paved roads, more than functioning healthcare, more than governmental transparency, every country must have a foundational epic film. As if robust economic growth was not enough, China boasts more than one recent example of this sort of cinema (the acrobatics and endlessly flowing fabric of Zhang Yimou's Hero come to mind). Thailand, too, joined the game with The Legend of Suriyothai, remarkable only for its ensemble of gold-laden, jewel-encrusted elephants. Bollywood's Lagaan, in which Rajhasthani peasants topple the British Raj by playing cricket, fulfilled the Indian desire for national celluloid "grandeur". England and New Zealand now share The Lord of the Rings, which evokes a mythical, primordial past for the former and draws in tourists for the latter. And Mali has an epic worthy of the brand: Souleymane Cisse's austere and beautiful Yeelen. Even places like Scotland (hardly a proper country) have their filmic myths of creation (though it fell to an Australian, Hollywood-based religious fanatic to make Braveheart for the Scots).

Enter Kazakhstan.

Though Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev may be rubbing elbows this week in Washington, another deal has already been struck between the Central Asian state and the US. Hollywood moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein have agreed to distribute Kazakhstan's attempt at the celluloid epic. Nomad has much in common with other epic films: a fragmented people unite under the lead of a lean, charismatic beau, who brings victory over the dusty, snarling invaders, not without saving the native princess, the immaculate (but saucy) essence of nationhood.

But there's a catch. Nomad is not your run-of-the-mill, smash-em-bash-em-save-the-day epic films. Because the film has been made almost entirely with government money. Because the opening and closing words of the film are Nazarbayev's. Because the real enemy of the piece is not the Dzungar tribe that rode so roughshod over the Kazakhs in the 17th and 18th century, but Sacha Baron Cohen, a 21st century comedian causing havoc with a film of his own.

By all standards, the Kazakh government's vigourous repudiation of Cohen's forthcoming Borat: Cultural Learnings of America Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazkahstan is a bit surprising. One does not recall official foreign ministry protests from Beijing after 55 Days in Peking, or four-page corrective supplements in the NYT and IHT issued by New Delhi after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or even a squeak from Mogadishu (or Baidoa, for that matter) after the release of the Somali-dehumanising Black Hawk Down. Nor have the Romanians responded with a film of their own to rebut stereotypes accumulated over the decades by the arcane Carpathian mountains and its fanged inhabitants.

Nonetheless, the Kazakh regime has chosen to delve into the world of popular culture with the incredibly heavy-handed (if not ham-fisted) gesture of Nomad. It all stinks of that typical authoritarian lack of imagination one associates with despots like Nazarbayev. The film and its surrounding rash of press coverage will serve only to paint the government of Kazakhstan in a more ridiculous light.

But one must feel a little sorry for Kazakhstan -- of all the backward, murky and fictitious eastern European states to litter western popular culture, it had the misfortune of being real.

And one must also question Cohen's persistence with the gag. There was a period in the life of Borat (particularly when Cohen took his character into the American south and uncovered the lively anti-semitism lurking within) in which his comedy approached the genius of Montesquieu's Persian Letters.

But it seems that everyone has forgot about that far better project (that is, using the lense of fictional "foreignness" to expose the absurdities of the familiar), and instead, we are left with two supposedly "competing" images, neither of which have anything really to do with Kazakhstan.