Review: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
The new Borat sequel—going by the full title Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan—is as timely as it is funny. That’s the biggest takeaway and, frankly, a great relief. I was worried that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakhstani news reporter character, created in the late ‘90s and reaching maximum pop culture exposure with the first Borat film in 2006, would have nothing new to say in 2020. Maybe we’ve grown as a society out of a need for a Borat, which has been culturally boiled down to overdrawn catchphrases at this point. But, while delivering solid laughs and smartly addressing the (crumbling) state of the world, the new Borat fits right into 2020.
Fourteen years after the release of the first Borat, this new mockumentary—featuring scripted moments tying real pranks together to form a complete narrative—finds Borat in poor standing with the nation of Kazakhstan, which has put him into a forced labor camp. To get back into the good graces of his country, Borat sets out to deliver a present to Vice President Mike Pence, with his daughter Tutar tagging along, played by Maria Bakalova (credited as Irina Nowak). As they make their way to Pence, they go to a Christian pregnancy center and have wordplay with a Pastor about getting a baby out of Tutar’s stomach—think “Who’s on first?” but with abortion. And, they attend a debutante ball with underage women being “presented” by their creepy old dads. They also go to a plastic surgeon to talk about Borat’s 15-year-old daughter getting a cosmetic overhaul. The Borat sequel’s main focus is feminism in the modern age; which is a surprising turn for a character partly built on being a misogynist. But it’s a needed new direction for the too-recognizable Borat, who put on a disguise for most of the film—yes, it’s Cohen playing a character playing a character. The focus is split between Borat and Tutar.
The sequel’s MVP is newcomer Maria Bakalova as Borat’s daughter, Tutar. Cohen’s greatest strength as the character of Borat is his ability to be in character and never break from that narrative, building each real scene without shattering that fourth wall. Bakalova makes that skill look effortless as she comfortably blends into that world. Like her father, she also becomes a news reporter. Watching Bakalova doing the same schtick as Cohen, roping in real people long enough to get pure insanity out of them on camera, feels a natural extension for this film series.
COVID-19 is an inescapable topic in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm; it’s clear that Cohen and his crew started filming right before the outbreak and kept rolling as we entered a socially distanced culture. It’s bizarre to live during a global crisis and see a major motion picture directly address it like the Borat sequel does. The pandemic ultimately becomes a crucial part of the plot by the very end and the film handles it as outlandishly as you’d expected, and it mostly works. The comedy mostly comes out of the idiots who aren’t taking the pandemic seriously at all; Cohen as Borat as a country western singer takes the stage at a right-wing gun rally to sing a ballad involving the liberal media getting injected with the “Chinese virus.”
And you can’t get any more timely, in the two weeks leading up to the election, than Rudy Giuliani, one of the president’s most trusted advisors. In Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, all roads lead to Giulianini, much like how the first film ended with an inevitable meeting with Pamela Anderson. The big difference is Guiliani isn’t part of the prank like Anderson was—Borat tried to put an in-on-it Anderson in a sack during a book signing with real people watching and reacting as it happened. I’m not going to get into what exactly happens (you can read the news for that), but it’s welcome fodder, proving once again Giuliani is easily duped and a gross figure who’s terrorizing the political theater at the moment. While there’s plenty of fabricated moments, the beauty of films like Borat and its sequel is that it always ends up shining a light on reality. You get a shining example of that with the Giuliani interview in the final act.
Cohen is a lot smarter this time around, he focuses his camera on the right targets and reevaluates his own comedic approach—his anti-semitic Borat meets a real Holocaust survivor and it’s not as inappropriate as you may think… okay, only a little, but still. Growth. In updating his character and the comedy, or at the very least understanding it more, Cohen and his crew bring Borat to the modern age and, for the most part, it is very nice.
