Borat 2 is the movie of the year, it’s 2020 in a bottle
Sacha Baron Cohen returns with comedy in the time of coronavirus
It’s called Borat 2, or Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm. Full title, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Working title, Borat: Gift of Sexy Monkey to Vice Premier Mikhael Pence for Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan.
It may not be the best movie of 2020. But it is clearly the greatest movie for 2020. This year and this film deserve one another. Having seen it, it’s almost impossible to imagine one without the other. It’s not for the faint of heart, but what about this year is?
Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakhstan’s number four journalist, is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, a man so committed to staying in character he once fell asleep as Ali G, a fictional British lowerclass lout, and woke up hours later – still as Ali G.
That kind of dedication to his craft surely served him well in Borat 2, which was shot in America during the early days of the pandemic. At one point he spends several days in lockdown with two Trump supporters, Jerry and Jim, who tell him the Clintons developed the coronavirus and also that they torture children and drink their blood.
Borat finds this easy to believe. But when he brings out his own theories about women’s right – that they shouldn’t have any – his new friends put up a fight. “They have a brain like we have a brain,” says one. “They can think and say the same things we can think and say.” Female inferiority, they tell him, “is a lie. It’s a conspiracy theory.” And they should know.
I almost threw up in my mask
The original Borat movie, now 14 years old – roughly 35 in pandemic years – had great fun with Americans’ casual acceptance of many of the worst –isms. The uneducated, antiSemitic, misogynistic Borat (played by the Cambridgeeducated, observantly Jewish Mr. Isla Fisher) had no trouble finding people willing to go along with his views.
He’s back at it here, often pranking shopkeepers who take the notion that the customer is always right to some frightening extremes. A party cake with “Jews will not replace us” written in icing? No problem! And when he asks a tanning salon employee what colour is best if you’re looking to score points with a racist, the answer comes back quickly: “I would say no darker than a 6 or 7.”
But Borat 2 is more than just a parade of the worst of us. One bright spot is Borat’s 15-yearold daughter, Tutar, played by 24-year-old Bulgarian actor Maria Bakalova. Not only does she throw herself into character with the same frightening abandon as her costar, but that character also undergoes a feminist awakening thanks to a talking-to by Jeanise Jones, a professional babysitter who decides early on not to take any crap from Borat.
There are brilliant, braintwisting moments of comedy, as when Borat is crushed when told that the Holocaust never happened, because in his village they celebrate Holocaust Remembrance Day and the part they played in running the camps.
When he’s corrected, he is thrilled at finally knowing the truth, but for all the wrong reasons.
Then there’s his gatecrashing of the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, when U.S. vicepresident Mike Pence took to the stage with the good news that there were only 15 cases of Coronavirus in the country, and that, “as the president said yesterday, we’re ready. We’re ready for anything.” I almost threw up in my mask.
To reveal more about the movie’s wonky japes and hijinks would be unfair to viewers, but there is one jawdropping moment near the conclusion that can be hinted at, especially as it’s already all over the news. Back in July, Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani was telling reporters that he’d called the police after an interview in a New York hotel turned into a prank.
“I only later realized it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen,” he said at the time. “I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”
Sorry Rudy. He totally got you. Or maybe you got yourself.