The brilliance and the horror of Sacha Baron Cohen’s oeuvre is what his gonzo comedy elicits in others. For the bulk of his career, Cohen’s preoccupation has been using his elaborate personas—Ali G, Bruno, and of course, Borat Sagdiyev, the star of catchphrase-spawning Borat and its sequel debuting Friday on Amazon Prime, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm—to catch the wild American in their natural habitat, subjecting them to absurdity and catching their response on camera. In Subsequent Moviefilm, the so-called Kazakh journalist is sent back to America, 14 years later, to curry the favor of international strongman “McDonald Trump” by presenting a gift to his “vice premier,” “Mikhael” Pence. The gift is a monkey named Johnny.
In most ways, the sequel follows the path of the original: Borat, misogynist boor, inflicts himself on the unsuspecting, goading them into admitting their own racism, sexism, or sheer stupidity. It can be both deeply uncomfortable and weirdly satisfying to feel the embarrassment Cohen seems pathologically inured to as he shamelessly bludgeons both his subjects and the viewer with pure, unadulterated awkwardness. But this time, Borat has a companion: his daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova), a feral 15-year-old whose chief desire is to acquire a glorious “wife cage” like her idol, “Queen Melania.” Bakalova has the same nerves of steel as Cohen, seemingly incapable of embarrassment or shame. Together the duo attempt to find Pence and/or other members of the Trump administration, even as the coronavirus pandemic begins to sweep across America.
Borat’s frattiest fans might despair of having a girl in their clubhouse, but Bakalova is a crucial and excellent addition to the Borat schtick. She gives Cohen a shred more credibility for saying the terribly misogynist things he does—and as Borat Subsequent Moviefilm capitalizes on multiple times, offers the filmmakers twice as much access for getting their gotchas.
The most outrageous moment in the film is a clip already released in advance of premiere, in which Tutar accidentally ingests the plastic baby on top of a cupcake—then takes her woes to the Carolina Pregnancy Center, where a pastor named Jonathan Bright counsels that the baby is “living and breathing” inside her. Cohen intervenes, saying that he is her father, and he’s the one that put the baby there—oh, you see the excruciating place this is going. Later the pair go to a debutante ball, where one of the other fathers says Tutar is easily worth $500, and to a plastic surgeon, where they request that Tutar get augmentation to make her worthy of a “sex attack.” Together they are a cunningly well-laid trap for the worst sort of sexualized paternalism, and repeatedly, they find creeps ready to take the bait.
This comes to an astonishing head in the final escapade of the film. Possibly because the pandemic squashed some of their plans, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm loses its head of steam in the last act; Tutar and Borat are separated. While Tutar pursues a career as a journalist, Borat quarantines with Jim Russell and Jerry Holleman, two Trump voters who think the Democrats are a worse threat than the coronavirus (which they say, by the way, is a hoax). But eventually the plot snaps back into place: Tutar sets up an interview with Rudy Giuliani. She meets the former mayor of New York and current adviser to the president in a hotel room, where he holds her hands, compliments her appearance, and follows her to the bedroom. She spends some time elaborately taking off their microphones; briefly, he lies down on the bed. His hand is in his pants. Watching it, your brain turns into an exclamation point. They are strategically interrupted before more transpires, but you cannot help wondering exactly what Giuliani may have done next. (Shortly after the event, which took place in July, Giuliani called the cops on Cohen.)
The funny thing about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is that for all of its childish pranks, it features multiple scenarios where Cohen’s unsuspecting subjects can’t be fooled out of their basic human decency. Late in the movie, Borat drops Tutar off with a babysitter named Jeanise Jones, who responds to Tutar’s hyperbolic ideas about women in society with some old-fashioned consciousness-raising. She shows Tutar that women can drive and make their own decisions; when Tutar tries to “defend” what her “father” has “taught” her, Jones responds straightforwardly, “Your daddy is a liar, okay?” (If she only knew.) In another scene, Borat enters a synagogue “dressed as a Jew”—which, uh, it might be anti-Semitic to even describe what he’s wearing—only to be faced with two gray-haired women who rapidly dismantle the irony he’s armored himself with. “Look at me, I’m Jewish,” says one, with the softest, warmest voice. It is a little version of Shylock asking if he does not bleed. (The woman, Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans, died shortly thereafter; the credits end with a dedication to her.)
There are inescapable frustrations with Cohen’s methods. His schtick is often more deeply uncomfortable than laugh-out-loud hilarious, and at times his humor comes across as cruel practical jokes. And of course there is the continued scapegoating of Kazakhstan, which really has nothing to do with Cohen’s persona (the scenes purportedly filmed there are in fact shot in Romania), but is still unwittingly implicated in his work. The country seems to be singled out for its obscurity; the average American does not know where either Kazakhstan or Romania is, making Borat a generalized foreign caricature—a misogynist, anti-Semitic, unwashed third-worlder, the fulfillment of every imagined stereotype. This is a pity for Kazakhstan, which then and now is subject to slander. But hopefully the country can forgive Cohen, and now Bakalova, for using its name as a tool to uncover the exact same ugliness within the American psyche.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan also has a major problem: It’s that 2020 so rapidly outpaced its jokes. In the ending montage that is “back in Kazakhstan,” the film finds a few new, funny ways to slice at the American coronavirus response, and introduces Cohen in the “maskini,” which he is wearing on the official movie poster. But you can almost feel the bits and gags left on the table as the production scrambled to reorient the film around the pandemic. They do a good job tying up the loose ends of the narrative to make the story work, but it’s only at the very end that Borat discovers QAnon and interfaces with anti-maskers, who exceed expectations for the depraved sentiments you might expect them to espouse.
On the other hand, Borat’s stunts are well suited to public gatherings—there’s a notable effort at CPAC 2020, which was held in February—and we don’t have those anymore. Or to be exact, we don’t have them safely. But as the world gets dumber and dumber, there seems to be a greater need for Cohen’s sneaky way of finding the funny—which has itself gotten more pointedly political over the last few years. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is his first project after the Showtime docuseries Who Is America?, where his team managed to get former vice president Dick Cheney to autograph a “waterboarding kit.” In a moment where no one in power seems to have quite enough shame, perhaps only the truly shameless among us can find a way to thoroughly embarrass them.
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