Comedian and actor Sacha Baron Cohen seems to have one goal when he dons the loose-fitting suit and goofy mustache of fictional Kazakhstani reporter Borat Sagdiyev: enabling his interview subjects to incriminate and humiliate themselves of seemingly their own accord. In short, he gets people to say and do compromising things of their own volition, with no one to blame but themselves. That schtick continues in the sequel Borat 2, whose release date on Amazon Prime Video is this Friday, October 23.
Borat’s latest “victim” is Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and current lawyer for Donald Trump. Those who pay attention to the news might remember that Giuliani called the cops on Cohen back in July for a vaguely described prank; Page Six reported at the time that Giuliani had phoned the police after a man wearing a “pink bikini with lace underneath a translucent mesh top” crashed what he thought had been an above-board interview about the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19. “This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shake-down, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” Giuliani reportedly said at the time. “I only later realized it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”
As Borat 2 wouldn’t be announced for months after the incident, at the time, it was generally assume that the prank might have been related to Cohen’s Showtime show Who is America?. However, now that the sequel is about to arrive on Amazon and screeners have been sent out across the internet, the details of the full scene have emerged.
Beware: Although we alluded to the scene in our review this morning, we’d generally consider the details a spoiler for the movie. However, it’s already being discussed all over, so we feel comfortable reporting the details.
In the scene, Borat’s “daughter” Tutar, played by Maria Bakalova, has lured Giuliani to a hotel suite for an interview. She acts nervous and flatters the political lawyer, who gets more and more familiar as the sequence proceeds, grabbing her hands, flirting back, and eventually, following her into the suite’s bedroom. Tutar begins helping Giuliani remove his lav mic, which is wired under his shirt, and appears to begin attempting to undress him. He briefly puts his hand on her waist, asks for her phone number and email address, and then appears to put his hand down his own pants for an extended moment, when Cohen bursts into the room before it can go any further.
It’s undoubtedly the most shocking scene in a movie that also shows Cohen, as Borat dressed in a flabby “McDonald Trump” getup, fireman-carry Tutar through the middle of the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to deliver her directly to Vice President Mike Pence in the middle of a very public speech–another incident that absolutely happened in February, and no, nobody at the time knew that it was Cohen under the grotesque rubber Trump mask.
In our review, we said, “If you liked the original Borat when it became a phenomenon almost 15 years ago, but are pretty sure it wouldn’t hold up to modern standards of political correctness and general decency–and rightly so–you might be pleasantly surprised by Borat 2’s timeliness, focus, and more wholesome sensibilities.” The sequel begins streaming on Amazon this Friday, October 23.
