The bumbling provocateur who stormed the United States in 2006 has now become an unlikely voice of reason.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the already infamous climax of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the Amazon sequel that heralds the return of the titular Kazakh journalist and agent of chaos played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat’s daughter, Tutar, is interviewing Rudy Giuliani in a hotel room when the situation takes an alarming turn: The former Mayor of New York, and current lawyer to the president, is shown reclining on a bed and reaching his hand into his pants. The whole scene is so cringe-inducing that it’s a relief when Borat himself bursts into the room, interrupting the encounter and jolting the tone from creepy dread back to zany confusion. “She’s 15. She’s too old for you,” Borat tells Giuliani, a typically tasteless rejoinder from America’s favorite faux-foreign mischief-maker. (While Tutar, the character, is 15, the actor playing her is 24.) As absurd and embarrassing as the hotel meeting is for Giuliani, who called the scene “a complete fabrication,” it underlines the accidental premise of the movie, which was shot surreptitiously over the course of this year. When Borat first rampaged through the United States for his 2006 cinematic debut, he held up a fun-house mirror to Americans’ views of outsiders, capturing real people nodding and smiling politely at this supposed journalist and his provocations. But in 2020, Borat has become the peacekeeper rather than the agitator. Borat, a bumbling caricature of a foreigner who possesses many wildly racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic viewpoints, was initially introduced as a side character for Cohen’s popular Da Ali G Show in Britain. Ali G (a dim but confident white man pretending to be Black) was Cohen’s breakout character in the UK, but Borat made the comedian a superstar in the U.S. While Ali G existed to mock a specific type of Brit, Cohen’s performance in 2006’s Borat offered a weirdly universal blend of shock-jock jokes, Chaplinesque physical humor, and blithe innocence. At a time when America was embroiled in two wars in the Middle East, he became a perfect foil for its sins as he wandered around the country, eliciting both suspicion and reflexive politeness with his outrageous tactics. The character resonates differently in the age of Trump. The current president’s emphasis on macho bravado, as well as his affinity for strongman dictators, is a real-life incarnation of Borat’s deeply misogynistic perspective (Borat refers to him as “a magnificent new premier named McDonald Trump”).
