The English troublemaker, creator of the character of “Borat”, grins himself again to probe Trump’s divided America. A sometimes lazy and uneven exercise but irresistible when it works. To discover every Monday evening on Canal + Décalé, from July 16.
British actor Sacha Baron Cohen was thought to be tired of dressing up. He seemed to have put his many whimsical and scathing alter egos in the closet for good (Brüno, Ali G, The Dictator and the most successful, the inescapable Borat). These iconoclastic fictional characters, unleashed in the contemporary world and confronted with real people, exploded with more or less relevance the prejudices of English and American society through the absurd, in a gesture of gaudriole as outrageous as it was salutary.
But difficult to continue to surprise when everyone knows you. After appearances at Tim Burton, a convincing role in Grimsby and a lead role in the highly anticipated Netflix miniseries, The Spy, it was logically thought that the career of the brilliant manipulator would continue only in fiction.
Until the surprise announcement, at the beginning of July, of the broadcast on the American channel Showtime and the English Channel 4 (and on Canal + in the wake) of a new series strangely called Who Is America ?. In this project, apparently carried out in secret for a year, the actor makes up again for ” without various personalities, known or unknown on the political and cultural spectrum, which inhabit the United States ».
In the first seconds of the first episode, Sacha Baron Cohen’s observation is clear, even caricatural. A succession of archive images of historical presidents of the United States gives way to the famous sequence of a Donald Trump in the countryside mimicking a disabled journalist. The country is divided, has lost its identity, and the election of this fanatic is the symbol. By creating four new characters, using many layers of latex, Cohen wanted to point the finger at what plagues the country: fake news, blindness of Republicans AND progressives, gun lobby.
Hilarious, squeaky and… scary.
Problem: Even though the four sequences each offer more or less funny moments, there is only one that really works. Cohen plays the role of an Israeli expert in anti-terrorism who goes as far as Congress to propose his idea of arming young people from 4 to 16 years old, in order to avoid mass killings in American schools! Some politicians and lobbyists follow him and even participate in an “educational” clip that teaches toddlers how to handle toy guns to ” make the bad guys sleep for a very long time “! It’s hilarious, squeaky and… scary.
It is when he manages to ridicule nauseating ideas and their defenders, like a John Oliver (but on the ground), that Sacha Baron Cohen succeeds in his bet. If the rest of this inaugural episode is not up to par (in particular the useless segment with Bernie Sanders facing a reactive and cheating “journalist” à la Alex Jones), we can expect a few strokes of brilliance in the following peregrinations. For example, we are impatient to discover the meeting with Sarah Palin, apparently furious at having been rolled in the flour. And why not Trump himself, as the highlight of the show? An impostor faced with a sham, that would legitimize this ambitious project, for the moment wobbly.
Who Is America ?, by Sacha Baron Cohen, every Monday from July 16, VOST, 8.30 pm, Canal + Décalé.
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