On demand: "Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm"

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm landed as an October surprise in that most turbulent of years 2020, engineered specifically as an intervention in what proved to be a fateful US election. Arriving almost fifteen years after the 2006 original, its candid-camera MO had had to change. Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat - a fresh-faced newcomer to American audiences in the first years of the new millennium - had now become so recognisable, both as a fancy-dress costume and out in public, that a new line of satirical attack had to be found. So it is we learn Borat has a daughter, the put-upon Tutar (Maria Bakalova), previously locked up in a barn back in Kazakhstan, now offered up as a gift from the Kazakh people first to Vice President Pence; after the latter frowns down on this offering from the podium of C-PAC, father and daughter have to make do with increasingly disgraced Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, in the sequence that became a headline grabber. There is more conventional story work than there was in the gleefully baggy, scattershot original, and a clearer throughline as Borat and Tutar discard the outrageously sexist, state-issued rule book that has previously governed their relationship, find common ground, and wind up singing "Just the Two of Us" over the closing credits. They are, in some way, a mirror image of Donald and Ivanka, an inversion of that ultra-conservative fairytale that insists girls be raised as princesses and then passed around as currency by our dealmakers. (The point is that even a clown like Borat realises he has to do better by his offspring.) Their targets - passing politicos, old money, a featherheaded trad-wife influencer - have been chosen with an eye to revealing the patrician privilege and sexist-misogynist attitudes Trump, his cohort and his entire political project represent.

Everything is political this time round, in other words, which has left Subsequent Moviefilm a pretty good document of where the world was heading into the 2020s: this is as much a single-issue comedy as The Great Dictator was in 1940, geared solely towards toppling Trump, as if the first film had been entirely about the kidnapping of Pamela Anderson. (It's one of those rare satires that sort of achieved its purpose, although we should recognise that, by November 2020, many other factors were in play.) There is copious evidence of frantic improvisation, both before and behind the camera, to achieve this goal; the project was some way into shooting when the world went into lockdown. There is also a measure of Machiavellian cheating, cutaways and ADR patch-ins designed to cover whenever these forced encounters didn't pan out as hoped, or where the point wasn't quite made on a first pass. Depending on your interpretation, Borat and Tutar's interactions with ordinary Americans - the shopkeepers and passers-by who serve as collateral damage in the push towards the Republican top brass - will either reveal jawdropping levels of casual prejudice, how deeply the nationalist poison had been swallowed, or most folks' desire to make (Borat voice) nice with the outsiders in their midst, however peculiar their worldview. 

What is inarguable is the crazed commitment to the bit, which elevates Borat 2 some way above the generally limp studio comedies of its era. Baron Cohen first emerged in the moment of Jackass, Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered and Dana Carvey's The Master of Disguise: you are reminded of this when he walks into C-PAC dressed as a Klansman, and into a synagogue dressed as the worst imaginings of anti-Semitic propaganda, and later when he spends some part of lockdown in a Big Brother-type scenario with two Pizzagate conspiracists. (At one point, he breaks the cabin's only flashlight so as to mistakenly-on-purpose order a box of Fleshlights: he's literally prepared to go round the houses in pursuit of a knob gag.) Bakalova not only matches but surpasses him, going way beyond the comic call of duty in a messy debutante-ball scene and, in that climactic confrontation with oleaginous big bad Giuliani, physically putting her body on the line. (You sense this encounter only went as far as it did because Rudy had been in Trump's orbit for so long the lines separating reality from fakery had been blurred: even if he'd clocked this was an obvious set-up, it was deemed no more of a set-up than the constructed reality shows he'd presumably been lining up in his head.) It isn't just big swings - Borat's scurrying walk and idiosyncratic pronunciation of "anus" still made me chuckle plenty - but the stakes have been raised: Trump would be seen off (for the time being), but we were only months away from January 6th, which Subsequent Moviefilm anticipates in its tense, edgy crowd scenes.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm is now streaming on Prime Video.