In a year brimming with sociopolitical absurdity like 2020, perhaps it's no surprise that everyone's favorite Kazakh journalist Borat made a triumphant return to screens in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. The satirical sensationalist, accompanied by his similarly misguided daughter Tutar, once again dives headlong into the underbelly of American nationalism. And while Sacha Baron Cohen and his improvisational equal Maria Bakalova certainly steal the show with their delightfully harrowing performances, the sequel's true brilliance comes in the form of a twist ending subtly built amidst the many farces and stunts.
Over a decade since his initial pilgrimage to the West, Borat has returned under the direction of his government to deliver a gift to the current American regime. When plans go awry, he tries to prepare his stowaway daughter Tutar as a bribe for Rudy Giuliani, sending the duo on a winding journey of hijinks through the nation's most controversial sets of circumstances. In the end, his bribe is unsuccessful, and he returns home to face execution, having failed at his mission to earn Kazakhstan the Trump administration's good graces. But when he arrives, he discovers he will not be executed, and that in fact, he executed his mission perfectly without even knowing it.
Harkening back to the infamous ending of The Usual Suspects, Borat and Tutar discover their government's plans to manufacture and distribute COVID-19 across the world as revenge for being made a laughing stock by the release of the 2006 film. Borat was injected with the virus and served as patient zero, spreading the illness worldwide through his distinctive greetings, rampant coughing, and general ignorance with regards to social graces and personal boundaries. But for keen-eyed viewers, these factors presented themselves in several ways far before the big reveal itself. Let's take a look at all the clues which linked Baron Cohen's character to the virus in the lead-up to the recent Amazon Prime release's big finale.
Borat's Signature Greeting
A notable carryover from the first film, Borat's method of introducing himself to new people makes him an ideal vector. His customary kisses on the cheek, used comedically to expose Americans' discomfort with intimacy and subtle homophobia, provide ample opportunity for the journalist to spread the virus. He kisses the package delivery recipient. He kisses his gracious hosts Jim and Jerry while taking a detour from his mission due to the lockdown.
Beyond the kissing, Borat also hi-fives plenty of others on his journey. In a post-coved-outbreak world, hand touching of any kind has taken on new meaning - and new danger. When mentioning how the Trump Administration's policies put Mexicans in cages, Baron Cohen's Kazakh journalist hi-fives a cage salesman. In countless other pranks, he makes physical contact with hapless participants. His simultaneous ignorance of both the global health crisis and social graces results in a very effective distribution system for his superiors' manufactured pathogen.
The Impact of COVID-19 on Filming and Writing Borat 2
As a guerrilla project, the movie the filmmakers made to comment on the times was, itself, influenced by the times. Shooting began before the fateful day in March when quarantine orders spread across the nation. Having captured this transition on film, the next clues to Subsequent Moviefilm's twist ending take the form of the actual progression of the pandemic. In one somewhat early stunt, Borat visits the CPAC 2020 convention where he presents Tutar to Vice President Mike Pence during a speech. Pence said this about the state of the Covid situation as the administration saw it in late February: "As of today, we have 15 cases of coronavirus that have been detected in the United States with only one new case detected in the last two weeks... And while the risk to the American public remains low, as the President said yesterday, we're ready. We're ready for anything."
But they certainly weren't ready for Baron Cohen's Trump-mask-clad outburst, and later on, it's shown through his adventures that the country wasn't ready for the ensuing pandemic. About an hour into the film, while attempting to reunite with the recently-escaped Tutar, he finds that "for some reason, the streets were completely empty." When he asks a bearded fellow leaving a gun store what's going on, the man responds "Everybody's at home. They're telling them to stay inside so they don't spread this virus," to which Borat says "there's a virus?" He's then welcomed into their home, where he receives more information from newfound friends Jim and Jerry on the virus: it's less dangerous than the democrats, it was invented by the Clintons, and unfortunately, it can't be killed by being hit with a frying pan (though that doesn't stop Borat from trying). While spending time living with Jim and Jerry as the "virus hoax" prevents him from reuniting with Tutar, he learns a song from the gentlemen which he later performs at a conservative rally. At the event, an announcer directly says "I don't see any masks out there," an artifact of the virus' progression through American society and its disregard by certain swaths of people - and a sign that Borat 2 was going to perhaps end up focusing on this subject matter.
The Ending Reveal
All these threads are connected in the finale. Having returned home to face execution for failing his mission, Borat is surprised when his supervisor announces they will not be executed. He exits, leaving Borat and Tutar discover peculiar evidence on the wall. Signs reading "How to get revenge on world for movie" and "create virus" are cut between moments from the film selected to illuminate the intricate plan. "They make this plague?" Borat asks Jim and Jerry. Rudy Giuliani says "and they deliberately spread it all around the world." Next, there is a sign revealed reading "Patient Zero Candidates" with Borat's image circled. Further clips from the earlier gypsy-tear injection reveal a bat crudely being distilled (were such a thing possible) overtop of Giuliani's assurances that nobody was eating bats; that this thing was created in a lab. Next, a shot of a sign that says "spread across world" while Borat makes his departure and travels Indiana Jones-style through all the virus hotspots. There's even see a clip of Borat coughing on Giuliani, who himself tested positive for the virus, as did many close Trump contacts.
In the end, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is a remarkable achievement in hidden-camera filmmaking as well as in political investigation and satire. The carefully-laid elements of the film's twist ending, one which was scarcely planned out at the time of the sequel's first conception, serve to support the film's, as Borat would say, "great success."