Borat loses his audience.
Now that Stephen Colbert moved on to his reward in Hollywood (scheduled to script the next The Lord of the Rings movie, The Shadow of the Past — no joke), Sacha Baron Cohen demonstrates what it means to have lost your laugh track. Cohen stars in Ladies First, a shadow of his own past as Borat, a pop figure from the anti–G. W. Bush years.
The left’s anti-Trump destabilization shadows Ladies First’s conceit: Baron Cohen plays boorish male chauvinist advertising executive Damien Sachs (demon testes), who bumps his head on a signpost and awakens to a topsy-turvy world of empowered women. Outmoded sexist shame is such a tired routine, it’s as if Baron Cohen only just found a response to the Me Too movement, years after Harvey Weinstein’s bicoastal sexual-abuse trials (one overturned on appeal, one mixed verdict including a conviction and mistrial, and the latest another hung-jury mistrial).
Ladies First is the product of an industry without the conviction and integrity of its own foul “beliefs.” Although remaking the 2018 French film Je ne suis pas un homme facile (I Am Not an Easy Man), British director Thea Sharrock and a team of three female screenwriters enlist Baron Cohen to give their travesty the illusion of “edge.”
Considering Great Britain’s current rollback of free expression, it’s not surprising that Ladies First resurrects feminism’s nightmare of denial from the late-’90s Hillary Clinton era. Hound-dog Damien is sexually objectified by female ad executives (Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw), who deny his professional expertise to prove their own agency.
The premise imitates Groundhog Day with Tootsie role reversal thrown in (plus the “Kelly Clarkson!” Brazilian waxing scene from Knocked Up). Pitted against Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, and Steve Carell, Baron Cohen loses (although he’s neck and neck with crumb-bum Seth Rogen). Baron Cohen looks constantly frazzled, unsure where this comedy is headed, as if he’s not in on the joke. Damien’s makeover for career advancement prompts the only contemporary line: “If you don’t get noticed, you’re just another childless cat man.” It riffs on JD Vance’s devastating “childless cat ladies” comment from 2021 that was revived in 2024 just before Ladies First went into production.
Most of the gags are self-congratulatory rather than funny. “You have a special this month on penile filler,” a cosmetician advises Damien; afterward, Cohen’s awkward walk is a joke only a transwoman could approve. When the distaff executives announce, “We need an agency with experience focusing on the male market,” Sharrock seems unaware of the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light catastrophe, afraid to broach reality.
Role-reversals comedy (simpering male office workers, rapacious female honchos) is obtuse, like Damien’s sex scene with his female boss (“Maybe we take turns being on top?”). When he accuses her of not having balls, she snaps back, “You mean the delicate sack that dangles from your body that with the slightest tap sends you weeping to the ground?”
This low-level humor confirms that progressive comedy has become pathetic. When Borat opened, J. Hoberman gushingly praised Baron Cohen’s democratic-socialist work with director Larry Charles: “The man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think.”
All one can think about during Ladies First is that Baron Cohen’s out-of-touch political clownishness (which only came close to working in his Chaplin update, The Dictator) has been exceeded — destroyed — by the audacity of MSNBC and CNN. After Damien’s second concussion, he awakens to reality, cued by a reprise of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” making him a bizarre conflation of Hasan Piker, Nick Fuentes, and Andrew Tate, all submitted to A Christmas Carol repentance. Baron Cohen should have studied Bill Murray’s superb Scrooged.
Instead, Ladies First misuses the splendid Richard E. Grant as a pigeon-covered indigent and casts stalwart Fiona Shaw as an aged, unappealing lecher. In her character’s funeral scene, the eulogy changes the Trinity to “the Mother and the Daughter and the Holy Ghost,” a reminder of the Democrat Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II’s foolish benediction “Amen and A-woman.” Ladies First proves that Baron Cohen has empathy for no one but humiliates all.
