Borat is back in the trailer for his Subsequent… | Little White Lies

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Borat is back in the trail­er for his Sub­se­quent Moviefilm

01 Oct 2020

Words by Charles Bramesco

A man with a moustache wearing a blue headband and minimal clothing, giving a thumbs-up gesture.
A man with a moustache wearing a blue headband and minimal clothing, giving a thumbs-up gesture.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s fool­hardy Kaza­kh reporter tack­les Trump and COVID in this sequel.

Just when we need him most, Borat has returned to us. Sacha Baron Cohen took a big bite out of Dubya-era cul­ture in the Unit­ed States with the block­bust­ing 2006 movie vehi­cle for Kaza­kh reporter Borat Sagdiyev, who came to the West on a mis­sion of enlight­en­ment that quick­ly spun out into cringe-wor­thy calami­ty. Now, Cohen and his alter ego will apply that same sear­ing satire to an Amer­i­ca in the throes of fas­cism and a pan­dem­ic. What could go wrong?

Today brings the first trail­er for Borat: Sub­se­quent Moviefilm. Last time around, the nation­wide road trip was moti­vat­ed by Borat’s desire to cap­ture actress Pamela Ander­son for a forced mar­riage; this time, he’s on a quest to present his daugh­ter to Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence so that the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion will shine favor on his home­land. Again, fool­proof plan.

The clip shows that Borat returns to a changed Amer­i­ca as a changed man, now too famous to walk the streets with­out get­ting rec­og­nized and chased by SEXY TIME!”-shouting fans. So he employs a series of dis­guis­es, don­ning fat suits and facial pros­thet­ics so he can get the drop on his unwit­ting subjects/​victims once again. In one such instance, he brings his daugh­ter to a South­ern pas­tor for an abor­tion that he claims has been pre­cip­i­tat­ed by incest.

That’s just the first of the ruckus­es he rais­es, from a tense encounter with a cop (appar­ent­ly, women aren’t sup­posed to ride on top of the car in the States) to a quar­an­tine from hell with some good ol’ boys to a final con­fronta­tion with Pence at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­ven­tion ear­li­er this year. Some­how, Cohen evad­ed arrest, and has left the rest of us with anoth­er mon­u­ment to the bril­liant stu­pid­i­ty that defines Amer­i­can culture.

The ques­tion is now whether Borat’s orig­i­nal light­ning can be re-bot­tled. Bush lent him­self to mock­ery much more read­i­ly than Trump, a joke that tells itself, and Cohen’s approach may have to adapt to that much. Either way, we know that we’re in for anoth­er glimpse of Cohen’s hir­sute, near­ly-nude body. In that sense, some things nev­er change.

Borat: Sub­se­quent Moviefilm will come to Ama­zon Prime Video in the UK and US on 23 October.

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