Film review

  • Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jason Woliner (2020)

    One of the main sequences takes place at an anti-lockdown rally in a Washington park.  Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat performs a song, composed during his recent stay with two QAnon fanatics.  The lyrics suggest alternative ways of dealing with various MAGA bugbears – Barack Obama, Anthony Fauci, journalists:  ‘Shall we inject them with the Wuhan flu/Or chop them up like the Saudis do?’  The crowd, signalling enthusiastic support for both Borat’s options, more or less takes over the singing from him.  That encapsulates Jason Woliner’s film:  its targets’ blithe malignancy keeps overshadowing the mickey-taking stunts designed to expose them.  Does this make Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (I’ll call it Borat 2 from this point on) a more penetrating political satire or more irresponsible as a gross-out commercial comedy?

    After fourteen years in a gulag – in punishment for the shame that his earlier American adventure inflicted on Kazakhstan – journalist Borat Sagdiyev is released by ‘Leader of the Nation’ Nursultan Nazarbayev (Dani Popescu) to undertake a reputation-retrieval mission.  Borat is to deliver Johnny the Monkey – not only the Kazakh Minister of Culture but also the country’s biggest porn star – to the USA.  On his previous transatlantic visit Borat defecated in the grounds of Trump International Hotel and Tower.  After that faux pas, he thinks better of approaching Trump direct and plans to hand over the monkey instead to Vice-President Mike Pence.  Before setting out on his mission, Borat returns to his  house and family only to find that he no longer has either – except for a fifteen-year-old daughter, Tutar (Maria Bakalova).  Since she’s a girl, she’s kept like an animal – in a barn.  Borat ignores her pleas to come to America with him.  He travels there, circuitously, by cargo ship, and fetches up in Galveston, Texas, where he soon discovers he’s a celebrity.  Preferring to keep a low profile, he buys multiple disguises.  Inside the shipping crate used to convey the Minister of Culture, Borat finds stowaway Tutar but no sign of Johnny, save for a few shreds of chimp’s clothing.  Accused of eating the precious cargo, Tutar insists (for now) that Johnny ate himself.  The bad news is faxed to Nazarbayev, who gives Borat the options of finding another suitable present or execution on his return to Kazakhstan.  Borat decides to make a propitiatory gift of Tutar.

    I didn’t catch up with the first Borat (2006) until four years after its initial release, by which time its most outrageous features had received a lot of media coverage.  As a result, I was less startled by the title character’s exuberant anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and sexual chauvinism than by the ridiculing of people whose reactions to him were often typical human ones, rather than characteristic of their particular religious or political tribe.  The advance of Trumpism and the advent of Covid (when shooting of Borat 2 was already underway) make a difference to this.  The toxic politicisation of large numbers of Americans in recent years has brought virulent nativism and prejudice into the mainstream of US life.  Attitudes within this constituency to Covid – fake news or Chinese germ warfare, according to taste – are a gift to the film-makers as a means of shaping and focusing the Borat 2 narrative.

    I don’t know why Baron Cohen originally chose Kazakhstan as the Old World epicentre of benighted prejudice (or how unfair that choice was and is).  By disregarding this, I could enjoy the broad comedy of Borat 2’s Kazakh prologue.  I laughed at daft things like the opening mock certificate declaring the film unsuitable for children under three.  The meticulously grotty look of national newspapers and TV made me smile.  I was comfortable too knowing that the Kazakh characters, from Nazarbayev downwards, were played by actors.   From the moment Borat arrived in Texas my reactions changed.  I was distracted by wondering how Baron Cohen and Jason Woliner were able to stage their stunts or convince those involved that they were taking part in the making of a serious documentary.   Maybe if I’d watched more Ali G years ago, I wouldn’t have given this a second thought.  But I just didn’t get, for example, how Borat, in a ludicrous Trump disguise, could breach security at the Conservative Political Action Conference.  He interrupts Mike Pence’s speech before being hustled out.

    The problem I had with the original Borat also re-emerges, in a minor form with the puzzled but obliging shop owner whose fax Borat uses to communicate with Nazarbayev; majorly, in the scenes between Tutar and Jeanise Jones.  After failing to deliver his daughter to Pence, Borat sets his sights on Rudy Giuliani, who boasted about an affair with a large-breasted woman.  Borat gets a job (as a barber) to raise funds for Tutar’s breast enlargement surgery; while he’s out at work, he leaves his daughter with Jeanise Jones, a ‘babysitter’.  Affable and strong-minded, Jones rubbishes the sexist lies Borat has told Tutar – that women can’t drive cars, that touching one’s vagina is spectacularly fatal, and so on.  There are two issues here:  what Jones thought was really going on and why Baron Cohen uses someone like her as comic cannon fodder.  The answer to the first question is a matter of some dispute.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘The New York Post reported that babysitter Jeanise Jones felt “betrayed” by the filmmakers who told her that she was going to be in a documentary about a young woman being groomed to marry an older man; she did not find out the true nature of the film until the day before it was released.  She later disputed that statement, saying that she was not angry at the filmmakers, and that it was her fault for not reading the release papers.’

    The answer to the second question is unclear too.  It’s not as if Baron Cohen, in duping Jeanise Jones and others in the film not defined by their political identity, is making a link between their suggestibility to his ruses and to Trump’s.

    I tend to be vexed by screen dramas that push a political message at the expense of dramatic substance and credibility (especially when the film-maker’s blatancy is then praised as artistic bravery).  To be honest, though, I don’t see much point to Sacha Baron-Cohen’s brand of comedy unless it’s driven by furious bias:  without this it’s merely an extreme – and extremely self-satisfied – variation on Candid Camera.  I wasn’t uncomfortable with a lot of the stuff in Borat 2 simply because I’m antipathetic to the types that dominate proceedings – the CPAC audience, the anti-lockdown protesters, Southern belles and their parents at a debutante ball in Georgia who get a grandstand view of Tutar’s menstrual blood as she dances with her father.  I’m happy to see someone like Macy Chanel, an ‘Instagram influencer’, taken for a ride because her line of work and pretentious spiel about it are dishonest and ridiculous.  Borat approaches Chanel for advice on how to transform the semi-feral Tutar into a desirable companion to a wealthy older man.  When Tutar says she’d prefer a man who’s near death, Chanel suggests finding ‘someone who’s just had a heart attack’.

    The anger that fuels the Borat films’ illustrations of anti-Semitism is real and sometimes effective.  One of the most succinctly trenchant moments in this one comes when Borat buys a fancy cake and asks for a message ‘Jews will not replace us’ to be piped in white onto the chocolate icing.  (The same words were a rallying cry for white supremacists at the notorious rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.)  The confectioner obliges without turning a hair, adding a few smiley faces, as Borat also requests.  Borat’s encounter with a pair of Jewish women in a synagogue is a different matter.  Tutar’s crash course in social media takes her to a Holocaust denial Facebook page.  When she scornfully informs her father that the Holocaust never happened, Borat is suicidal.  He goes to a nearby synagogue, wearing the accoutrements of a stereotypical Jew (including a Pinocchio-style nose), in the hope of being mistaken for the real thing and getting shot.  The two elderly women that he finds inside welcome and comfort him.  Themselves Holocaust survivors, they assure Borat it is no lie.  He leaves with his faith in human nature – that is, his belief in the Nazi genocide – restored.

    Like its predecessor, Borat 2 aims for sustained humour by blurring the line between satire and extravagant bad taste – a clever tactic with potentially queasy consequences.  It lets viewers so inclined feel they’re always laughing at hitting-the-mark lampoon rather than lapping up grossness.  And some viewers – and reviewers – are so inclined:  they evidently need to think that watching and enjoying the film puts them on the side of the angels, and that the motivation in making it is similarly high-minded.  There are signs that Sacha Baron Cohen is happy to encourage this and himself susceptible to the need to self-justify.  According to Wikipedia, when Jeanise Jones lost her job as the result of Covid cutbacks, a GoFundMe campaign started by the pastor at her church raised $150,000 dollars for her in a week; Baron Cohen donated $100,000 ‘to her community of [sic] Oklahoma City …’.  Judith Dim Evans, the woman who does most of the talking in the synagogue, died before the film was released.  Her heirs brought a lawsuit (which was dismissed unconditionally) alleging that she hadn’t consented to ‘the commercial use of her likeness in the film’ (Wikipedia).  Baron Cohen has said that he ‘broke character’, immediately after filming the sequence in the synagogue, to enlighten Mrs Evans, who was concerned about Borat’s anti-Semitic remarks.  The film carries a closing dedication to her, quoting one of the genuinely humanitarian sentiments in her kindly words to Borat.  This dedication appears right at the end of the closing credits.  It’s a striking conclusion to a film that began with that not-for-children-under-three certificate.

    It’s hard to know what to say about the lead performance, except that it’s better than Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Oscar-nominated supporting turn in The Trial of the Chicago Seven.  Maria Bakalova’s work as Tutar has won her a supporting role Oscar nomination too, as well as several awards from critics’ circles.  That surprises me but this young Bulgarian actress is remarkable.  She’s on Baron Cohen’s wavelength yet, unlike him, creates a plausible mockumentary character.  Although Tutar says and does consistently incredible things, Bakalova plays straight.  It’s easier to see how Tutar, once she’s has had her American makeover, takes people in – not least when she’s posing as a conservative journalist dying to interview her hero, Rudy Giuliani, in a hotel room.  This quasi-bedroom scene made big headlines when the film was released, shortly before American Election Day 2020.  Those headlines, needless to say, soon shrank.  Borat 2 gets unfunnier as it goes along – partly because it runs out of comic steam, partly because plenty of people in it are, for different reasons, no laughing matter.  The actual behaviour of Trump and his court puts them virtually beyond the reach of satirical mischief-making.  If the result of last November’s election had gone the other way, I know I couldn’t have stomached watching this film.

    1 April 2021

  • Poppy Field

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Câmp de maci 

    Eugen Jebeleanu (2020)

    This Romanian film has been among the online offerings at both the Glasgow and BFI Flare festivals in recent weeks.  The best of the three Flare films I saw this year, Poppy Field is among the best I recall seeing at this festival in any year.  It’s a character study, of Cristi, a thirtyish, closeted gay man in present-day Bucharest, and covers rather less than one day in his life.  At eighty-one minutes, it’s an unusually short feature but long enough to be almost completely satisfying in what it sets out to do.

    In Firebird, another Flare 2021 film, Peeter Rebane describes his main characters’ working routines on a Soviet-era air base before revealing that they’re gay.  First-time director Eugen Jebeleanu does the opposite in Poppy Field.  The first quarter-hour or so concentrates on the protagonist’s private life.  Cristi (Conrad Mericoffer) welcomes his French lover, Hadi (Radouan Leflahi), who’s come to stay for a few days at his apartment.  They spend some time together there – making love, chatting, eating and, in Hadi’s case, praying to Allah – before Catalina (Cendana Trifan), Cristi’s sister, stops by.  She’s come with a present of food and, it’s clear, to satisfy her curiosity about her brother’s boyfriend.  Cristi mentions that he has to work later in the day but says no more about his job.  Jebeleanu eventually cuts from the apartment to inside a van carrying Cristi and colleagues in the Jandarmeria, Romania’s paramilitary police.

    To be fair, it would have been almost impossible for Peeter Rebane to keep the military base under wraps while introducing the principals in Firebird.  The approach of Jebeleanu and Ioana Moraru, the writer of Poppy Field, is more dramatically effective, nevertheless:  they build a picture of who Cristi is before placing him in a macho working environment that’s quickly confirmed as inimical to his sexuality.  The chat inside the police van is straight talk – mostly about girlfriends – but things will soon change.  Cristi’s unit is en route to a cinema, where protesters have interrupted the screening of a queer (lesbian) film.  The gendarmes are confronted by a stand-off between angry audience members and the protesters – a group of Christian nationalists.  They brandish Madonna icons and Romanian flags, sing hymns and the national anthem, yell homophobic abuse.

    Heading the police presence at the cinema are a senior female officer, Oancea (Valentina Zaharia), and Mircea (Alexandru Potocean).  Cristi remains relatively in the background.  His face shows the personal pressure of what’s going on but not to the extent that preoccupied colleagues would notice.  It’s in the margins of the disturbance that the situation turns more directly threatening to him.  A young man (Florin Caracala), there to see the film, speaks to Cristi, asking ‘Don’t you recognise me?’   He’s persistent and attempts to ignore him are futile.  Cristi loses it and thumps the man before being restrained by furious colleagues – Stroia (George Pistereanu) is the most furious – and told to calm down in the now emptied and out-of-bounds theatre where the film should have screened.  His colleagues’ reasoning is that, if there’s no sign of Cristi, it’s easier for them to rubbish the victim’s claims as to who assaulted him.

    In the minutes that follow, as a hubbub continues in the foyer, Cristi alternates between bursts of anger, trying to escape from the auditorium to sort things out, and complete inaction.  He slumps in one of the seats, stupefied.  At one point, he stands on the stage in front of the screen – facing the rows of red plush seats that presumably give the film its name and the audience that isn’t there.  Every so often, a different colleague enters the room but only one member of the public does so – a man who thinks he dropped his mobile under his seat but can’t remember where he was sitting – and he’s accompanied by a gendarme.  Cristi is taciturn throughout the film but says even less than usual in one-sided conversations inside the theatre with Mircea and Claudiu (Alex Calin).  The emotional dynamic of this whole episode – with Cristi reluctantly ‘closeted’ – is potent.

    In terms of incident, that’s just about it.  At the end of their shift, the gendarmes stand round their van in the cold, dark street.  Though he doesn’t stand physically far apart from the others, Cristi is detached from the group.   Everyone but him has bought fast food.  When Mircea offers parts of his sandwich Cristi declines (Mircea knows something’s eating him).  Taking a phone call from Hadi, Cristi reminds him about food in the fridge and says, quietly and tenderly, that he’s looking forward to getting home.  Mircea gives him a lift and, as before, does nearly all the talking.  The man Cristi assaulted had a bloody face but wasn’t seriously injured.  Oancea – ‘a good guy’, according to Mircea – has said she won’t be instigating any disciplinary action.  Mircea urges Cristi, in light of this narrow escape (‘the stars were aligned for you’), to talk to him in future if he feels the need.  Cristi says – in the form of a hollow ‘yes’ – that he will.  It’s early morning when Mircea drops him off, though not in the street where he lives.  Cristi says he wants to walk on his own for a bit.

    ‘Kisses,’ says Mircea as Cristi gets out of his car.  This, the last word of Ioana Moraru’s script, somehow captures Cristi’s fraught and fragile situation.  Mircea is genuinely concerned for his younger colleague, though also exasperated by him.  His farewell – jokey yet regretful – may be Mircea’s way of telling Cristi he knows he’s gay.  The earlier, longer scene between them in the cinema is also remarkable.  Mircea tells the sad story of how he and his wife have fallen out after briefly adopting a poorly stray dog that Mircea then insisted getting rid of.  Given the film’s total running time, this monologue accounts for too much of it.  It’s absorbing nonetheless, thanks to Alexandru Potocean’s delivery, and it brings about real mood changes.  Mircea feels better for getting things off his chest.  Cristi, though sorry to hear of Mircea’s troubles, is relieved at being expected to listen but not to reply.

    The brief exchange with Claudiu  is a startlingly effective contrast – here, Cristi listens mutely and in fear.  Claudiu expresses sympathy with him, recounting an incident in a gents’ toilet where another man exposed himself to Claudiu then cast aspersions about him.  After oddly remarking that he admired the flasher for his nerve in trying it on, Claudiu says the man now causing trouble for Cristi has claimed they used to be an item.  Claudiu reassures his colleague that ‘Your secret’s safe with me’.  Do those words suggest Claudiu is acknowledging a secret of his own?  At any rate, Alex Calin gives the sequence an electrifying ambiguity.

    Eugen Jebeleanu doesn’t explain much but this is an enriching strength of Poppy Field rather than a careless or evasive weakness.  We’re told Cristi already has a black mark on his work record for aggressive conduct but not the details of the earlier incident.  We’re not told what Hadi’s work is.  When he arrives he’s wearing a business suit; when he leaves, he tells Catalina, he’ll be on a flight to Hamburg.  This is enough to give a sense of Hadi’s living an extrovert, larger life than Cristi does.  We don’t know whether the screening resumed or was cancelled.  Protests of the kind described in Poppy Field really have taken place in Romania (in response to Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right (2010) and Robin Campillo’s BPM (2017), among others).  They’ll presumably take place again – so there’s logic in not confirming a definite outcome to the one Jebeleanu depicts.  We don’t know the facts of Cristi’s acquaintance with the young man in the cinema – or, indeed, the latter’s name (he’s ‘The guy’ in the IMDb cast list).  The point is, rather, to imply that Cristi has had gay liaisons and, to that extent, is vulnerable.  Beyond what Claudiu tells him and the possible subtext of Mircea’s cryptic cheerio, we don’t know either quite what ‘the guy’ tells Cristi’s colleagues about him.  That gives an added charge to Cristi’s sequestration in the cinema.

    The most important unresolved element, of course, is the conflict between Cristi’s sexuality and his secrecy about it.  He has survived a crisis but that means things will go on as before – except, maybe, worse than before.  (The events of the night will surely put a damper on the short time he’ll have with Hadi.)  Conrad Mericoffer is exceptionally good in the lead.  He conveys subtly yet strongly the continuous strain of the life that his character has chosen to lead.  Cristi has got so used to keeping his feelings under wraps that part of him is withheld even when he’s with – and loving being with – Hadi.  When he holds Cristi, Hadi seems to try to make him less tense.  Even as they lie side by side and chat, though the talk is sometimes humorous, Cristi is never quite at ease.  Hadi proposes they go on a trip to the mountains for the weekend and can’t understand why Cristi won’t agree.  The reason is soon clear enough:  for Cristi, being in the closet means staying in the apartment.  Even though his sister knows he’s gay, he sees her visit as an invasion of privacy.  (When he gets mad with Catalina it’s a foreshadowing of his more violent reactions in the cinema.)

    The visualisation of Cristi’s predicament is obvious but effective.  After stressing the limited space of his apartment, Jebeleanu and DP Marius Panduru show Cristi virtually caged in the police van.  When the gendarmes enter the cinema, packed with angry people, a handheld camera reflects the volatile situation and, increasingly, the danger it poses to Cristi.  There’s also handheld camerawork in the earlier scenes in Cristi’s flat.  I was less convinced by this as I watched:  in retrospect, I can see that Jebeleanu meant the jumpy camerawork to suggest Cristi’s situation even at home – at least when he experiences a sense of threat there.  If memory serves, the handheld camera isn’t used when Cristi and Hadi (played by Radouan Leflahi with sensitive charm) are on their own.  It’s certainly conspicuous only once Catalina arrives – when handling the situation becomes more complicated for Cristi.

    Catalina isn’t a deliberately hostile presence – and is puzzled by her brother’s increasingly hostile manner towards her.  She and Hadi chat awkwardly but pleasantly.  (The cultural mix in the scenes at the flat is rich:  there are bits of conversation in English and French, as well as Romanian; Hadi says his Muslim prayers; one of the traditional Romanian dishes that Catalina brings with her includes pork.)  But Cristi’s sister does reveal a prejudice less conscious than that of the Christian nationalist demonstrators:  as he angrily shows her the door, she refers to the ‘gay phase’ Cristi’s going through.  Other gendarmes occasionally disparage members of the cinema audience; and the fact that the latter, unlike the protesters, are repeatedly asked by the police to show their ID implies institutional homophobia.  Yet the only determinedly anti-gay remarks from officers at the scene are voiced by Cristi, in the panicky hope that verbal attack is the best means of defence.

    There aren’t too many reviews of Poppy Field in evidence online and only four so far on Rotten Tomatoes.  Most of these are positive (and Jennie Kermode’s enthusiastic Eye for Film piece especially cogent) but reservations expressed about the film are instructive, too.  Ştefan Dobroiu, on a site called Cineuropa, ends up ‘wishing that Cristi would put up more of a fight in his struggle as a gay man’:  not for the first time, a reviewer comfortable with stories of gay pride or anti-gay persecution is uneasy with descriptions of gay anxiety and guilt feelings – it’s as if these are letting the side down.  The one negative review on Rotten Tomatoes, by Alistair Ryder, is more broadly critical.  (The notice has evidently appeared in more than one online location.)  Ryder describes Poppy Field as ‘an overly familiar tale of the pressures of the closet that detracts from the more compelling drama happening around it’ – by which he means the demonstration at the cinema.

    In other words, the film should have explored the menace of the retrogressive forces behind such protests rather than the mindset of one closet gay.  Ryder’s argument ignores both the scale of the challenge involved in dramatising this menace (as opposed to making a documentary about it) and the signal achievements of Eugen Jebeleanu’s auspicious film-making debut.  He and Conrad Mericoffer have created a moving portrait of a convincingly unhappy man but the protest that triggers a crisis in Cristi’s life isn’t, in any case, consigned to the margins of Poppy Field.  It’s a particularly strident expression of the cultural pressures that have nurtured Cristi’s rarely relieved, unquiet struggle with himself.

    24 March 2021

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