‘ Borat’ sequel takes down misogyny
Once again, he paints Kazakhstan as a giant mud pit that periodically belches livestock and hovels. Again, he runs like a locomotive, arms chugging and frequently with bare butt cheeks pumping, too. Again, he plans and executes elaborate disguises and pranks, this time to humiliate the likes of “Michael Pence” and Rudy Giuliani, and the far less famous — an imperturbable copy shop guy, an earnest pastor at a women’s health clinic.
In short, Sacha Baron Cohen, as his longrunning character Borat in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” offers much to lure his fan base of sophomoric young men and any who find solace laughing at a louder, more blundering standin for their own embarrassing Old Country relatives. But if the bait is familiar gimmickry, oneupped to target prominent Republicans in the runup to the 2020 election, Cohen’s actual mission is to wage total warfare on misogyny.
His approach is methodical. With Maria Bakalova as Borat’s daughter, Tutar, the film attacks the hatred, oppression and violence that young women face at every phase of their maturation. It slams the male preference they encounter beginning in the womb (“I have a non-male son?” Borat asks). It knocks the cartoons and cartoonish real life that instill in girls retrograde notions of gender. (” Once upon a time,” says a narrator in an animated Disney princess-like film that Tutar watches from her hay-strewn pen, “there was a lowly peasant girl called Melania from s— hole country Slovenia, who dreamed of marrying a rich old man.”)
It pillories the way the world represses and punishes girls’ sexual pleasure, the way it seeks to make them afraid of their own bodies. “Her vagine,” reads Tutar’s “favorite story,” using an incorrect-on-purpose translation, “became very angry and bit her hand, then sucked all of her inside, where she remains to this day.” And it’s equally critical of the way the world sexualizes women for male pleasure. “Luckily,” says Borat, of trying to make Tutar appealing to Giuliani, “I discover his preference for womens with ample cheeseproducing capacity” — right as the pair walk into a plastic surgeon’s office.
In an especially ingenious scene that could have worked just as well in a weird performanceart piece, the mockumentary captures our conflicting feelings about women’s coming of age: fetishization of its outward appearance and social rituals yet disgust with the biological processes that underlie it. It takes place at a debutante ball in Texas, all white gowns and long gloves, symbolizing that though its women have “come out” and reached a marriageable age, they are still pure. In stride Borat and Tutar, who is on her “moon blood,” decide to do their Kazakh “traditional fertility dance.” Tutar starts lifting her skirts higher and higher to give peeks of her menstrual fluid, culminating in a full spreadeagle display. For attendees, there weren’t enough pearls to clutch.
The film’s most riotous scene lays bare just how ambivalent we are about sexual violence toward women. When Borat and Tutar visit a “women’s health center,” the attending pastor thinks that they’re talking about getting an abortion and that Borat is the father. “I don’t need to hear any more of that,” the pastor says, followed by several iterations of “I understand,” concluding with, “Listen, really, that is not important right now. We’re in this moment. It really doesn’t matter how we got to this moment.”
Discussing the film with the New York Times, Cohen said, “We wanted it to be a reminder to women of who they’re voting for — or who they’re not voting for. If you’re a woman and you don’t vote against this guy, then know what you’re doing for your gender.”
But undecided female voters aren’t looking to Cohen for guidance. What he can do, though, is guide the same men who gravitated to his “Da Ali G Show.” He can reach them in a way that female comics and filmmakers, who are at least as funny and keen as he is, can’t. That’s how entrenched, still, are norms telling men it’s a sign of weakness to consume or connect with art created by a woman, let alone laugh at a woman’s joke.
In so doing, Cohen models how to use privilege and power for good — modeling echoed by Tutar’s and Borat’s mirroring narrative arcs. She goes from submissive to introspective to strongwilled; he goes from ignorant to grudgingly dogmatic to conflicted to supportive.
He makes space for her, as Cohen makes space for Bakalova. Maybe, the movie implies, its male fans can make more space for the women in their lives.
“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” pillories the way the world represses and punishes girls’ sexual pleasure, the way it seeks to make them afraid of their own bodies.