The Borrowed Uniform
The new Ali G film opens with Voltaire. Those who can make you believe absurdities, the screen warns, can make you commit atrocities. Sacha Baron Cohen then spends the rest of the film proving it, with considerable help from a prosthetic penis.
There is a small joke hidden in that epigraph, and I suspect Baron Cohen knows it. Voltaire never quite wrote the line. In 1765, in the eleventh of his letters on miracles, part of a quarrel with Geneva’s clergy, he wrote something closer to this: whoever has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust. The sharper word “atrocities” arrived two centuries later, in a loose English translation that later generations adopted as scripture. So the film begins with a quotation in borrowed clothes. It is the right start, because Ali G: Who Iz I? is a film about borrowed clothes.
Released by Amazon MGM on Friday, it is Baron Cohen’s first feature as director and the character’s first big screen outing since Ali G Indahouse 24 years ago. The premise is thin by design. After two decades of idleness in Staines, Ali learns that his girlfriend Julie, played by Morgana Robinson, is eight months pregnant. He flies to America to reclaim his former glory and, as with Borat, many of the people he meets there are not acting. The critics are divided. The Metacritic aggregate stood at 38 on release, while Chortle gave it four stars and ranked its best stunts alongside Chris Morris.
The louder argument began before anyone saw a frame. A campaign tried to have British cinemas drop the film, and Black British comedians including Gina Yashere and Mo Gilligan revived objections first raised soon after the character appeared. The broadcaster Afua Hirsch wrote that when he first appeared she knew he was mocking people like her, and that “Black people don’t dress like that anymore.” Colton Dunn, a Black American comedian who helped write the story, replied that Ali G is not a racist character but “a tool to expose racists.”
The film meets the charge head on. Ali is sent to an expert in African American heritage, who tells him to learn what lies behind the culture he wears as costume. He concedes it would be among the hardest things he has ever done, and decides not to bother. It is the most honest scene in the picture, because Ali G was always partly a portrait of his creator. Baron Cohen grew up breakdancing in Covent Garden and has described himself and his friends as middle class Jewish boys adopting a culture they thought was cool. He later spent a year on Kibbutz Rosh HaNikra with Habonim Dror and, at Christ’s College, Cambridge, wrote his history thesis on Jewish involvement in the American civil rights movement. The man mocking cultural tourism studied one of the most celebrated alliances two minorities ever built, an alliance that has frayed badly since.
Yet the costume Israelis should watch most closely is not the tracksuit. It is the accent.
Baron Cohen also revives Erran Morad, the counterterrorism expert from his 2018 series Who Is America?, a retired Israeli colonel who was absolutely, definitely, never in Mossad. In that series Morad persuaded Dick Cheney to sign a waterboarding kit and coaxed a gun rights activist into a firearms training video aimed at toddlers. In the new film he trains a militia of Trump supporters to defend their land against the immigrants they fear.
Morad is the funniest character in the Baron Cohen catalogue for an uncomfortable reason. He works. Nobody asks him for paperwork. In large parts of America an Israeli accent attached to a security claim is a credential that skips inspection, a uniform anyone can put on. Krav Maga studios in shopping centres, consultants advertising former Mossad service, gadgets sold as battle tested in Israel: the country’s reputation for competence, earned at terrible cost, has become a costume on the open market. Baron Cohen, who speaks fluent Hebrew, plays it with the precision of someone who has heard the real thing.
That should worry Israel more than any review. A country that lets others wear its uniform will end up judged by whoever is wearing it. When some of Israel’s most fervent American admirers love the commando rather than the country, the friendship rests on a caricature, and caricatures transfer loyalty easily. Hirsch’s objection to Ali G applies here too: a caricature freezes a living culture at the moment it was first drawn. Israelis do not, on the whole, resemble Erran Morad. The real country is a quarrelsome democracy that votes on Tuesday, for the sixth time since 2019, in an election widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership since 7 October. No colonel in sunglasses can answer the questions that ballot will ask.
Voltaire’s own point, in the version he actually wrote, was that once one faculty of the mind is tyrannised, the others soon follow. Believe the absurd and the unjust comes next. That is precisely what the film’s finale shows, as ordinary people persuaded of plainly ridiculous stories appear to go much further than they ever should, because the stories fit what they already believed. A costume is a shortcut past thought. That is why it is dangerous in a satirist’s hands, and more dangerous in a politician’s.
Who Iz I? plays in cinemas for one weekend only before it is expected to move to streaming. Staines renamed itself in 2012, partly to shed the character, and in September its council voted down an Ali G attraction to mark the new film. A costume, it turns out, is far easier to put on than to take off. Tonight the last screenings end. The lights come up on rows of empty seats and spilled popcorn, the room empties, and the costume goes into an archive where it will play for ever. The question on the poster stays behind in the dark. On Tuesday, Israel answers its own version of it.