BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

In a world where large swathes of educated people wilfully believe that vaccinations cause autism; and that the Clintons and Bidens are part of an elite paedo ring; and that Covid is a hoax; I am was was really wary of watching a new BORAT film.  Isn't real life already filled with toxic racism, homophobia and misogyny?  How do you satirise bigotry when the entire political discourse of America in 2020 feels like it's gone through the Looking Glass?  But I am so happy that I watched this film, because it's really fucking funny, and really fucking horrifying, and both are important things to experience and acknowledge right now. Because whether or not the White Supremacist in the White House is evicted next January, the attitudes he exposed, the grievances and bigotry he unleashed, the lies he peddled will remain in the public discourse.  We need Borat to help us channel our anger into laughter, but we need to feel angry nonetheless.

Of course, if the world has changed for us, it's also changed for Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is so recognisable he has a knock off fancy dress costume as seen in this sequel.  So Cohen couldn't actually use the Borat character to lure his bigoted marks into a false sense of security and expose their hatred.  Rather, he has to spend most of the film as Borat dressing up as someone else. And the real heavy lifting is done by the previously unknown but apparently comic genius Maria Bakalova, playing Borat's daughter Tutar. It is Bakalova that exposes the misogyny and sexual perversion at the heart of public life, not least in the coup de theatre that is the final scene where she plays a OAN-style news reporter in mini-dress and blonde wig, buttering up a lascivious Rudy Giuliani, who is all too ready to have a drink with her in a bedroom, let her take off his mike, lie back on the bed and apparently start to masturbate. What an absolute sleazebag. 

Which isn't to say that Baron Cohen/Borat doesn't have some phenomenal scenes himself.  In this sequel, we see Boart released from a long prison stint for embarrassing Kazakhstan's dictator, and sent to America to offer Trump a gift to make sure that he's seen as a friend of Trump in the same way that Bolsanaro and Putin are.  But Borat's daughter Tutar has contrived to be shipped to America instead, so that Borat has to offer HER as a gift. Cue some really queasy discourse about the pornification of young girls, and the appropriate role of women in modern life.  The most awful scenes are probably a tie between an anti-abortion pastor ignoring a case of incest and rape to focus on preventing abortion, and Borat in disguise singing a song to the delight of his bigoted audience as they chant along that their enemies should be given the Wuhan Flu while raising Nazi salutes.

Basically this is a film that makes you sick, but also makes you laugh in the way that maybe only Sacha Baron Cohen can. It's absolutely the film for this moment.

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated R. It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

FAHRENHEIT 11/9

FAHRENHEIT 11/9 is Michael Moore's latest agit-doc, purportedly focusing on the damage that the Trump presidency has done to democracy and freedom in the USA, and the rising risk of despotism.  Moore makes draws an explicit parallel between Trump and Hitler, and even lends credibility to this hyperbolic statement by interviewing Timothy Snyder - a professor of history at Yale and one of the foremost writers on fascism in Europe in the mid twentieth century.  But for the most part - and surprisingly - this isn't really a documentary about Trump at all.  Accusations of collusion with Russia are handled in a throwaway sentence at the start of the film.  Rather, Moore is far more concerned with the structural dysfunction in American politics that allowed Trump to come to power - and spends as much time criticising the Democratic party and Obama as Trump himself.  In fact, I was shocked to find no exploration of gerrymandering or voter suppression by the GOP, but plenty of exposure of the DCCC annointing candidates and trying to cut those deemed too left wing off at the knees.  To be sure, both are problematic but it seemed weird to focus on the one without the other.  Both stymie the democratic expression of the will of the people. Moore is more balanced when he returns to Flint Michigan to expose the water crisis - excoriating Governor Rick Snyder but also the flaccid response of Obama. 

The overall thesis of the film seems to be that Trump is just the most extreme expression of what the GOP does - which is to pander to the rich.  But that the Democrats have cleaved too far to the centre to try and win elections and have ended up being as corrupt and pointless as the GOP. He therefore shines his spotlight on the new radical left - whether that be Democratic Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - or most movingly the survivors of Parkland - who are tearing up the rule book and demanding radical change.

The result is a film that seems at times frenetic - jumping from one topic to another and then back again. But I admire the ambition to show how everything is joined up and systemic rather than just focusing on the egregious behaviour of Trump. That said, I continue to find Moore's stunts tiring - cheapening the force of his arguments. 

FAHRENHEIT 11/9 is rated R and has a running time of 128 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2018 and is now available to rent and own.