In front of a film with Sacha Baron Cohen – I think of those where he gives life to his TV characters, the aspiring gangsta-rapper Ali G, the Kazakh journalist Borat, the Austrian fashion expert Brüno – you always get the impression that you miss him something, to have arrived when something fundamental has already passed. Perhaps it is the limit of cinema compared to television (where those characters could feed on current events, situations immediately recognizable by the viewer), perhaps it is my professional deformation, spoiled by many (too many?) Years of more traditional, more narratively structured comedy. The fact is that his films leave me with a strange dissatisfaction, a feeling of wanting (or would have wanted) but I can’t (I couldn’t).
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So it is also for this film with the mileage title – Borat –Followingof cinema movie. Delivery of portentous bustarella (but the original says “bribe”: perhaps it was better to translate “corruption”) to an American regime for the benefit of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan – arrived on the Amazon Prime platform just in conjunction with the American elections. This is no coincidence because the heart of the film is precisely the confrontation with the political representation of the conservative right, against which Baron Cohen wants to exercise the weapons of his satire.
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The pretext is the mission that the president of Kazakhstan entrusts right in Borat: to bring a tribute from the nation to the American Vice President Michael Pence to reconnect relations between the United States and his country, forgotten by Trump’s diplomacy despite the ideological harmony that could bind them. The problem is that Borat lands in Texas with his daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) in place of Johnny the Monkey, a real chimpanzee and minister of culture (!?!) Who was supposed to be the “gift” to offer. And so, to scorn the girl, the father ends up asking for help from a kept girl; to free her from a mini-doll she has swallowed, she enters a life assistance center that does everything to persuade her not to have an abortion (where the misunderstanding about the “expulsion of the child” triggers one of the most chilling scenes on elasticity morale of certain people); to make it attractive she would like to have a cosmetic surgeon, and so on.
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All scenes where you don’t quite understand what the boundary between truth and fiction is, between satire and documentary. Or perhaps, better, between reality and mockumentary, as you come to think in the scenes where Borat breaks in disguised as Trump and with a girl on his back at a Michael Pence election rally or starts singing a song against Obama at a meeting of QAnon militants. Or when the daughter, posing as a reporter, manages to interview Rudolph Giuliani (who does not seem to have behaved like a gentleman).
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But in all these scenes, the disruptive force of reality (with Baron Cohen breaking into more or less hostile environments unexpectedly) ends up being dampened by a direction that never tells how it ended. The press office took care to let it be known that the singing performance among the deniers risked ending badly, but in the film all this is not apparent and the effect on the screen is only that of a not too funny joke. You get the impression that the comedy of Borat always stops before it reaches its climax, that the camera stops filming it too soon and that it is aimed at a viewer who already knows everything and therefore does not need to show to the end. the scenes.
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Instead of the anonymous Jason Woliner it would take him to direct a Michael Moore, capable of perfectly closing those situations he had “opened” with his irruptions or questions. Only at the end “Borat – Sequel of cinema films” etcetera etcetera manages to hit the mark, when it addresses the theme of the pandemic and the worldwide spread of the virus, even involving Tom Hanks, but perhaps it is a bit too late to straighten the legs of the film.
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November 6, 2020 (change November 6, 2020 | 9:05 pm)
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