Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)

After 14 years of forced labor in a prison camp, a Kazakhstan journalist (Sacha Baron Cohen) is released to go to America with a gift of a monkey porn actor for then vice president Michael Pence. But when the monkey's crate arrives in the U.S., the monkey is dead and instead the journalist's daughter (Maria Bakalova) in in the crate. Directed by Jason Woliner, this is a sequel to the 2006 BORAT. As a mockumentary, the film is uneven. Cohen frequently crosses the line from outrageous humor to bad taste but I confess, I laughed. Normally, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of filming people who don't know they're being made fun of or ridiculed but in this case, they deserved to be. It's a political satire on reactionary American culture and some scenes although funny are infuriating to watch like the pastor of a pregnancy crisis center more concerned with preventing an abortion than the fact that a father impregnated his teenage daughter. The film allows the humanity of two of its filmed "victims" to shine through: a Holocaust survivor who attempts to educate Borat on his anti Semitic views and a black babysitter who takes Borat's daughter under her wing and encourages her to stand on her own two feet. In addition to its biting satire on conservative American culture, the film focuses on the daughter's emergence from a destructive patriarchal culture to a feminist leader. As the daughter, Maria Bakalova received sterling reviews and justifiably so, she's a real find.