We’re only days away from the second coming of Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, and Variety has an exclusive clip of one of his many misadventures.
From producer and star Sacha Baron Cohen and distributor Amazon Prime Video, the sequel to Cohen’s hit 2006 mockumentary returns again to the United States to probe cultural divides — this time, with his teen daughter (reportedly played by Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova) in tow.
On a pit stop in the Carolinas, Borat and his offspring indulge in cupcakes from a local bakery — adorned with decorative infants, as if meant to celebrate a baby shower. When the teen accidentally swallows the ornament, she and her father rush to a local women’s health clinic.
“I have a baby inside me, and I want to take it out of me,” Miss Sagdiyev tells Pastor Jonathan Bright of the Crisis Pregnancy Center. Borat, who fed his daughter the cupcake, informs the doctor he feels bad, “as I was the one who put the baby in her.”
An awkward exchange ensues. The film is set to hit Prime Video on October 23, with its gloriously long title, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
Cohen discussed the new project at length in a recent interview with the New York Times, explaining why it was relevant to resurrect Borat nearly 15 years after the original.
“In 2005, you needed a character like Borat who was misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic to get people to reveal their inner prejudices. Now those inner prejudices are overt. Racists are proud of being racists,” Cohen said, singling out Donald Trump as “an overt racist, an overt fascist.” “My aim here was not to expose racism and anti-Semitism. The aim is to make people laugh, but we reveal the dangerous slide to authoritarianism.”