Borat: Sub­se­quent Moviefilm

Like Hem­ing­way before him, Borat Sagdiyev has returned to Amer­i­ca to find a nation changed. Sacha Baron Cohen saw fit to revive his most inspired com­ic cre­ation, the calami­ty-prone Kaza­kh reporter with a taste for reveal­ing swimwear and con­vivial anti-Semi­tism, to plunge him into a Unit­ed States beset by Trumpites, resur­gent Nazi activ­i­ty, and soon after the start of shoot­ing, a viral pandemic.

Recent years have yield­ed no short­age of grist for his satir­i­cal mill, even as the character’s pop­u­lar­i­ty has made get­ting the drop on unsus­pect­ing marks some­what more tricky. You’d think every­one would have learned their les­son back in 2006, but as we see and have seen, quite the oppo­site is true; Amer­i­cans have nev­er been proud­er to espouse their grotesque views on camera.

This is to say that the mech­a­nism of humour that pow­ers the Borat rou­tine – coax out a subject’s most per­verse views via the earnest clue­less­ness of a for­eign­er – still works like a charm. But it’s applied more pur­pose­ful­ly and selec­tive­ly this time around, with a par­ti­san polit­i­cal bent absent from the orig­i­nal feature’s free-for-all offending.

A final title card urges view­ers to vote, pre­ced­ed by a visu­al gag vaunt­ing the hero­ism of Dr Fau­ci, two ges­tures toward activism total­ly out of joint with the pre­vi­ous film’s all-irony eth­ic. That flash of straight­for­ward earnest intent clash­es awk­ward­ly with the defi­ant refusal to take any­thing else seriously.

In the pre­vi­ous decade, Borat could get his yuks by ask­ing a pan­el of fem­i­nists why they couldn’t land hus­bands; now, his arc most­ly con­cerns accep­tance of his daughter’s agency as a woman. This occa­sions some slug­gish footage, in which young Tutar (Maria Bakalo­va, giv­ing one of the most fear­less per­for­mances in screen com­e­dy his­to­ry) learns her worth from her kind, patient babysit­ter while her dad’s away earn­ing $72 for breast aug­men­ta­tion surgery.

Truer to form, this also cul­mi­nates in the girl tri­umphant­ly announc­ing to a room full of female Repub­li­cans that she’s just dis­cov­ered the mir­a­cle of mas­tur­ba­tion. The bids to make good on the just-jok­ing misog­y­ny in Borat’s past suc­ceed only when wrapped up in some­thing inge­nious­ly stu­pid or dis­gust­ing, such as a dance rou­tine with men­stru­al flair.

Borat embarks upon a cross-coun­try jour­ney to deliv­er a bribe to Mike Pence in the form of a famed mon­key, with mis­sion drift first set­ting in when he opens the trans­port crate to find wil­ful Tutar and a simi­an skele­ton. (He ate him­self, she insists.) He then resolves to deliv­er the fif­teen-year-old as a child bride to Pence, and after get­ting thrown out of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­ven­tion, to next best thing Rudy Giuliani.

The for­mer May­or, by the way, does come off more as a leath­ery, lech­er­ous thing than a man, in a seg­ment tee­ter­ing on the precipice of the legal­ly action­able. Far and away the film’s most shock­ing footage, it’s a reminder of the unique pow­er Borat has to pen­e­trate the real in a way that car­toon­ists, TV per­son­al­i­ties, tweet­ers and oth­er polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors cannot.

They can spec­u­late and research while he goes out and shows how trou­bling­ly easy get­ting hard proof of moral defor­mi­ty real­ly is. A pas­tor pos­ing as a doc­tor at a sham abor­tion clin­ic turns a blind eye to incest in his effort to pre­serve the foe­tus; a plas­tic sur­geon tells Tutar he’d have sex with her if her father wasn’t sit­ting there in the room with them; a débutante’s dad esti­mates the mon­e­tary val­ue of a good woman at $500.

Any fears that every­day life in a top­sy-turvy US would ren­der Borat redun­dant have been mis­placed, mer­ci­ful­ly. His hit-to-miss ratio may not be what it used to be, as shown in the drag­gy mon­tage dur­ing which he annoys the hell out of his con­spir­a­cy-mon­ger­ing quar­an­tine mates. But even if noth­ing hits the high of his full-frontal fight with Aza­mat (what could?), Borat has exceed­ed expec­ta­tions at a time when good come­dies have nev­er been spars­er or more pre­cious. For that, all we can say is ​“Chen­qui!”