Borat: Subsequent Movie Film...

 2020, d. Jason Woliner - AmazonPrime

 

varyniice

 The good news is Borat's Subsequent Movie Film For Make Complicated Remembering Of Title is pretty funny.
The bad news is we'll face another decade of people doing Borat impersonations.

It's important to remember that this isn't a documentary, that Sacha Baron Cohen is even more agenda driven than before, and that editing is manipulating what you see of every "real" encounter in the film. There's multiple purposes for the editing: comedic timing, storytelling, pacing, but also to make staunch Republicans and their more extreme, Trumpian supporters look very, very, very (very, very, very) stupid...like brain damaged sheep. 

The in-story joke of Borat's first movie film is he's the "idiot foreign reporter" compared to the people he interviews, with the meta-joke being SBC dupes the rubes he interviews into being their worst selves, thus exposing the ugly underbelly of America while still largely holding the country in awe and esteem. But this film, the in-story joke is the rubes here make Borat's backward sensibilities seem tame, and the meta-joke is that SBC can no longer dupe them for comedic purposes because they've already been duped by Trump, QAnon, Facebook and all the other bullshit they ingest to fuel their ever-more ironic (and dangerous) superiority complex. In this one, Borat comes out having learned a thing or two and grown as a human being. Jews are no longer freightening, but Americans sure are.

The funniest elements of Borat: Subsequent etcetera are at the start and the end, taking plcae in this film's purely fictional interpretation of Kazakhstan. The plot device for Borat's return to America is pretty funny, but it kind of loses its steam mid-way through the movie, and the sobering reality of spending time with QAnon faithfuls is more depressing than amusing. These people self-satirize, so there's nothing SBC brings to these encounters that can make them look any more foolish than they already do. 

Likewise, there's a stretch where Borat's daughter, Tutar (the delightful Maria Bakalova), spends time in the company of a Republican women's group where she publicly talks about the joy of having just discovered masturbation in the bathroom, and it's met with a polite acceptance rather than the scandal or outrage that was likely the hoped-for reaction. If anything this film is kind of feminist in its outlook. Both Tutar and Borat meet very kind women who seek only to help and educate these misguided foreigners. It's really quite lovely the charity of these women even when facing baffling absurdity. It flies in the face of comedy but it's also the most powerful aspect of the film. 

Even moreso than the film released in the Bush years, this Borat outing has an agenda, but what it's looking to say is nothing we don't already know. The ugly underbelly of America has been fully exposed for four years now and it's pretty much beyond satire. It does the film, and it's approach to comedy, a disservice to keep trying. There's a story to this film, Borat's awakening from ignorance (relinquishing his anti-Semitism and misogyny), but the more immediate anti-Trump political agenda drags the film down, if only because there's nothing more to say on the matter. The only solid Trump joke here is the Melania-as-Disney-esque-Princess animated movie. 

The funniest "gotcha" sequence was Borat and Tutar's crashing of the debutantes ball.  Those upperclass twits had no idea what to do with what they were seeing.

 The Giuliani thing is set up and then heavily edited to make him look bad (or, rather, worse than he actually is). He comes off looking like a fool, but he always does, so there's, again, nothing new here.

 The strange thing is, this film is so contemporary, it already feels dated.  Trump and the coronavirus are pretty much all we hear about, they're so overexposed that making a film and rushing it out in the middle (hopefully closer to the end of it all) feels less necessary.