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