Sacha Baron Cohen hates Donald Trump. Since 2003, when Cohen cosplayed as his infamous character Ali G in an interview with the future president, the feeling has clearly been mutual. But Cohen certainly does not hate Trump’s supporters.
The blockbuster headline to emerge from Cohen’s new sequel to the seminal comedy Borat is that his protege, the Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, managed to finagle Rudy Giuliani into a booze-filled hotel interview while she pretended to be Borat’s daughter — pretending to be a conservative journalist. Contrary to the initial scoops claiming that Giuliani was caught with his hands in his pants, literally, the scene is more notable for the president’s personal attorney’s blissful recklessness. It’s also an anti-climactic climax to a plot that is secondary to the point of the story.
“In 2005, you needed a character like Borat who was misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic to get people to reveal their inner prejudices,” Cohen told Maureen Dowd prior to the sequel’s release on Amazon Prime. “Now, those inner prejudices are overt. Racists are proud of being racists.”
While Cohen seems to have gotten more cynical thanks to the president he calls “an overt racist” and “an overt fascist,” Borat Subsequent Moviefilm speaks for itself, illustrating a very sick America but one that’s full of fundamentally redeemable people.
As with the 2006 classic, the film mostly (though perhaps slightly less so than the original) features Cohen and Bakalova in full character, the daffy Kazakh journalist and his oppressed teenaged daughter interacting with people totally clueless of their real identities. But unlike the classic, the actual character of Borat is now a national celebrity, forcing Cohen to adopt even more outlandish Russian nesting dolls of characters.
Cohen, an observant Jew with close ties to Israel, no longer lampoons anti-Semitism but tries to coax retroactively blindsided bystanders into exposing their own. In too many cases for comfort, they do. When Cohen takes Bakalova to a plastic surgery consultation to get a breast augmentation, the doctor posits she needs a rhinoplasty as well. This leads to Cohen making an obviously offensive and extended riff about Jewish noses, which the doctor more or less nods along to. In another scene, Cohen and Bakalova ask a baker to write in icing on a cake “Jews will not replace us,” which the baker does willingly and with a smile.
But perhaps even more so than the original, this sequel provides some promise even of those who ardently follow the president the real-life Cohen despises.
In Georgia, the filmmakers set up a ruse of a cotillion ball where they hired unsuspecting dads and daughters at $100 a pop to film a fictional debut. Throughout the ball, Cohen makes the crowd visibly uncomfortable as he asks, “How much?” a daughter costs, and Cohen and his fake daughter engage in some sort of absurd fertility dance, which Bakalova ends by flashing the audience her nether regions laden with menstrual blood.
Yet one of the daughter’s responses to a dad joking that one would cost $500 is the sort of feminist disgust not out of place at a Women’s March, and until Cohen and Bakalova’s dance devolves into grotesqueness, the cotillion attendees all smile and clap along to this odd, foreign dance.
Toward the end of the film and at the beginning of the real-life coronavirus lockdowns, Cohen gets two QAnon-believing Trump supporters to take him in for a week. Despite their wacky delusions about Democrats, they’re nothing but kind to Cohen, who clearly tries to provoke them. In fact, they’re arguably feminist.
Cohen himself admitted that he wanted the world to see that despite some of the more unsavory folks in the film, that most were more victims of current trends than affirmative agents of hate.
“They’re completely different to the politicians who are motivated by their own power, who realized that they can create fear by spreading these lies through the most effective propaganda machine in history,” Cohen told Dowd of the two QAnon believers, whom he calls “ordinary folks who are good people.”
The political climate may be different from 2006, and the bad eggs more willing to show their stripes, but the people fundamentally are not. Just as Borat was capable of making good, conservative Southern women stretch their hospitality onion-thin to excuse his antics back then, the same holds true with most of Borat and his daughter’s subjects. If you can set aside your personal feelings about the president, it’s a story more patriotic than political.
