Bribe on Time: Cohen Resurrects Iconic Satirical Caricature for Shock Commentary

Director Jason Woliner steps in for Larry Charles to helm Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, the sequel to the runaway 2006 success which made Sacha Baron Cohen an indelible cultural fixture and revamped the mockumentary into a roughhewn, socially weaponized time capsule. But this reiteration of Cohen’s fictional television reporter from Kazakhstan is hardly the final nail in the coffin of the GOP, despite all its considerable daring, as some may have hoped for with a release less than two weeks before the most detrimental presidential election unveils a hope for a country’s future or a continued season of the White Witch. Instead, although Cohen is up to his usual outrageous antics, which range from cheap laughs while mining the rich playing field of archaic and misogynistic cultural tendencies to jarring revelations of base human behavior, his latest effort reveals the extent of desensitization we’ve grown accustomed to.

While revealing the depravity and utter falsehoods of several key Republicans, the film arrives like a contorted stillbirth, an immediate period piece attempting to address a swiftly tilting landscape, but too little and too late to negatively affect the fascist powers who continue to be impervious to the kinds of scandals which would have drummed them out of commission back in 2006.

Locked up in a gulag and forced to endure hard labor for shaming his country fourteen years ago, television journalist Borat Margaret Sagdiyev is sent back to the US to curry favor from the Trump Administration by bestowing Mike Pence with a gift, which happens to be Kazakhstan’s Minister of Culture, Johnny the Monkey. In short, after a labored journey, Borat arrives in Galveston to find his fifteen-year-old feral daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) snuck into Johnny’s crate and ate him on the journey over. Borat, threatened with torture and death if he returns, offers to instead give Tutar to Pence. But first, he has her made over, groomed for plastic surgery, and subjected to a degrading debutante ball. It’s all in vain, for they can’t get close enough to Pence.

When Tutar begins to see how American women live, she shirks her father’s ignorant, demeaning treatment of her, desiring to become a journalist. Running away from him, they are further estranged by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Borat holes up for several days with a pair of QAnon conspiracy theorists, who bring him to a rally he crashes after discovering Tutar will be reporting. Reunited with his daughter, they decide the next best plan for them will be to offer her as a gift to Rudy Giuliani. But eventually, Borat discovers he has some reservations when push comes to shove.

In 2020, the notion of the ‘mockumentary’ in today’s divided landscape, suggests a remaining majority of sane citizens—what’s wrong with preaching to the choir if there’s still a choir to preach to? But how does satire infiltrate and enrage when using the language of Newspeak? One need look no further than one of the infrequent sequences where Borat is absent, his daughter Tutar excitedly explaining to a Hillsborough Republican Women’s Club about experiencing her first orgasm. They respond to her faux pas (talking about her vagina in public with fervor and enthusiasm, that is) politely enough, but just pause your screen for a moment on one aged brunette, whose face contorts viciously despite the ‘kind’ words she utters, like the glitch of those women in The Witches.

For Cohen’s core audience, there’s really nothing shocking here, which makes the sequel seem more depressing than funny, leaden than lofty. His antics in his native Kazakhstan, lorded over by a man operating in facility that looks like it’s straight out of The Institute in Dau, are amusing at best. Often, these asides feel too overly scripted, like a sketch which has run out of steam, while other tangents, such as the kindly Black woman who briefly babysits Tutar and guides her to a rudimentary sense of agency, assist in the distraction of wondering what’s really an elaborate prank or merely vulgar potshots at shock/schlock.

The advent of false news and social media’s hand in fostering blatant ignorance seems to justify a tangent where he visits a synagogue dressed as a flagrant caricature of degrading Anti-Semitic accoutrements (wherein Cohen reportedly broke character to assuage Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans, whose heirs are contesting her appearance). While you might cringe, the two kindly Jewish women happen to be the only kind human portraits of a world on a wire.

But for all the Hillsborough harridans and the gross right wing rally and their elitist counterparts at the debutant ball, the real piece de resistance if, of course, the controversial moment where Rudy Giuliani is caught on camera unzipping his pants in a bedroom with Tutar, who is presented as a fifteen-year-old. While Giuliani has been attempting damage control via vehement denials ever since this was filmed, it’s clear what’s happening. A gonzo sketch palette which marries America’s troubled climate to the exaggerated antics of an archaic totalitarian patriarchy, Borat 2 shines brightest through the fresh energy of Maria Bakalova in her debut, who scores most of the laughs through a series of cringeworthy set pieces.

Whatever its ultimate cultural effect will be, Cohen has surely brought us to the forefront of examining how and where microphones are installed on a person. For anyone who is shocked or bothered through viewing this ‘prodigious bribe,’ take your newly found or renewed disgust for chicanery and hate mongering to the voting booth.

★★★/☆☆☆☆☆