Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

There’s a saying we Americans have, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, uh…. You … you can’t get fooled again.”

In this quasi-documentary, BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM, we return to the world of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, Borat Sagdiyev, the inept journalist from Kazakhstan who began as sketch comedy on F2F and Da Ali G Show, and evolved into the protagonist of 2006’s BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN.

Fourteen years later, a national disgrace for shaming his country, to redeem himself in the eyes of his government, Borat must curry favor with the Trump administration by presenting Johnny the Monkey, “Kazakhstan’s minister of culture and number one porno star,” to Vice President Mike Pence. The producer of Mr. Sagdiyev’s previous documentary, Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian), has been turned into a recliner.

To Borat’s surprise, and ours, he discovers his daughter, Tutar (Maria Bakalova), in a shack. She stows away in the shipping crate with the monkey. When they arrive in America, the monkey doesn’t quite make it. Enter Plan B: Borat will offer Pence his daughter. Apropos, “tutar” means “amount” in Turkish.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: yes, Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, appears to diddle himself in a scene where the actress portraying Borat’s daughter persuades him to have drinks in a hotel bedroom immediately following a staged interview.

That the movie, written by Cohen and directed by Jason Woliner, has to weave a fictional narrative in with the documentary is either its strength or weakness. A successful documentary exhaustively captures enough that the footage speaks for itself. BORAT isn’t attempting to be a documentary so much as it’s a comedy about the idiocy of stereotypes, punctuated by real-life examples of people’s bigotry.

The debate, then, is whether or not the sequel serves any purpose in 2020, a year in which sexism, racism, xenophobia, are out of the closet and flaunted by the very Presidential administration Cohen’s attempting to mock. It’s a bit hard to do satire these days.

The structure of the sequel is similar to the original. Cohen begins thrusting anathema upon working class people. It’s a bit unfair at first, putting a cell phone salesman on the spot with pornographic banalities. The ruse quickly shifts to larger, perhaps more deserving targets. Visiting with an Instagram influencer, Tutar learns what a sugarbaby is. It’s debatable whether Bakalova, purposely made up with a unibrow and a prosthetic nose, is under more makeup than Macy Chanel who instructs her in the ways of mutually-agreed upon gold-digging.

From clothiers, to cake bakers, to abortion clinics, to plastic surgeons, one by one each demonstrates a lack of judgment in situations that require it. The first act culminates in a Southern debutante ball, followed by a visit to a cosmetic surgeon who, of all the things he could’ve said when propositioned by Tutar, he replies, “If your father weren’t here…”

In fact, the only two people who treat Borat and Tutar like human beings are a Black woman and a Jewish woman¹. The message: White Americans, particularly in the Midwest and South, are bereft of empathy. What’s telling is how each of these ethnic minorities corrects the purposeful falsehoods put forth by father and daughter, without demeaning them. With escalating outrageousness, Cohen and Bakalova give every unsuspecting individual every opportunity to see the ruse. The white Americans become increasingly perturbed, impatient, and ultimately condescending while feigning politeness, while the minorities remain unfazed and determined to be kind to our two protagonists.

Enter Jim and Jerry, two country boys whose ignorance, coiled around itself several times over, is almost sentient. One says they can’t do to Democrats what they want to, “Because unfortunately they have the same rights we do.”

They’re so close… The moment evokes the “eleven” scene from Rob Reiner’s THIS IS SPINAL TAP in which band member Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) stops chewing his gum when he can’t wrap his mind around the director’s suggestion, “Why don’t you just make ’10’ louder?”

If Borat exploits the power of groupthink in a manner not unlike propagandists exacerbating racial tensions, Tutar subverts it to the obverse. Immediately after Bakalova brings a group of conservative women along the journey of self-realization, she confronts her father’s lies about the role of women in society. Part of the Borat mythos owes to Cohen’s own Jewish background. Here, the joke plays in reverse with satanic glee: Showing him a fake news website, Tutar convinces Borat that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Borat is heartbroken. Here lies the inexorable conclusion of racism’s mountain of logical fallacies.

And that’s the point. Americans are so easily manipulated¹. If you can convince anti-Muslim people to sing, “journalists, what we gonna do/chop ‘em up like the Saudis do,” you can convince them to shoot their face to spite their nose. If that hadn’t already happened, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm might be a kind of warning. But films like this, like those of Bill Maher, are made not to change minds but to amuse the base. They convince no one of anything they didn’t already believe. That is, ultimately, where Cohen’s shtick fails to be truly subversive. To subvert isn’t merely to twist a phrase, but to undermine a system. BORAT undermines nothing. As raucously funny as I find it, I’m not sure we’re in a place where we can afford that kind of indifference to shaping the trajectory of human values.

The woman, Judith Dim Evans, passed away while the film was in post-production.
Nowhere is this more astonishing as when Cohen crashes the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). This actually happened. What’s startling is not that Cohen makes his “offering” to Pence in the middle of the latter’s keynote, but that he got into the conference dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes. Once inside, he then changes into his “McDonald Trump” costume.