Village of the Slammed

I'm not saying that I doubt the veracity of the Daily Mail's reporting in this article, but it's still hard to believe some of the accusations being made here against Sacha Baron Cohen and the crew of Borat.

When Sacha Baron Cohen wanted a village to represent the impoverished Kazakh home of his character Borat, he found the perfect place in Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running water and where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land.

But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.

Unbelievably, it turns out that the Kazakhstan-set sequences that open Borat were actually filmed in the impoverished Romanian village of Glod. (Actual translation of the word "glod": Mud). If you read the entire article, it also claims that the town is mainly inhabited by Borat's hated gypsies, who thought a documentary was being made about their grinding poverty.

They claim film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the project, which they believed would be a documentary about their hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty and isolation.

Villagers say they were paid just £3 each for this humiliation, for a film that took around £27million at the worldwide box office in its first week of release.

Now they are planning to scrape together whatever modest sums they can muster to sue Baron Cohen and fellow film-makers, claiming they never gave their consent to be so cruelly misrepresented.

Disabled Nicu Tudorache said: This is disgusting. They conned us into doing all these things and never told us anything about what was going on. They made us look like primitives, like uncivilised savages. Now they,re making millions but have only paid us 15 lei [around £3].

I just assumed that these scripted sequences were created on a Hollywood set. Seriously, I had no idea any of that stuff was real. I'm a big fan of Borat, and I understand that the whole concept is an elaborate prank, but playing a prank on isolated and desperate Romanian villagers and failing to even pay them fairly for their inconvenience and effort doesn't strike me as particularly funny.

I don't feel bad for those drunken frat boy assholes who are suing Borat because now we all know what racist, chauvanist, arrogant assholes they are. I think those USC students learned a valuable life lesson from Borat - being a sloppy drunk who says ignorant, racist shit all the time will eventually get you into trouble.

Those guys really have no excuse for their behavior and deserve our collective scorn. But systematically oppressed peasants hoping for a few scraps in exchange for some extra work on a film project? Are those really Cohen's intended targets?

The crew was led by a man villagers describe as 'nice and friendly, if a bit weird and ugly', who they later learned was Baron Cohen. It is thought the producers chose the region because locals more closely resembled his comic creation than genuine Kazakhs.

The comedian insisted on travelling everywhere with bulky bodyguards, because, as one local said: 'He seemed to think there were crooks among us.'

While the rest of the crew based themselves in the motel, Baron Cohen stayed in a hotel in Sinaia, a nearby ski resort a world away from Glod's grinding poverty. He would come to the village every morning to do 'weird things', such as bringing animals inside the run-down homes, or have the village children filmed holding weapons.

Mr Tudorache, a deeply religious grandfather who lost his arm in an accident, was one of those who feels most humiliated. For one scene, a rubber sex toy in the shape of a fist was attached to the stump of his missing arm - but he had no idea what it was.

Only when The Mail on Sunday visited him did he find out. He said he was ashamed, confessing that he only agreed to be filmed because he hoped to top up his £70-a-month salary - although in the end he was paid just £3.

That's pretty indefensible behavior, regardless of the hilarity of the finished product. I don't think the Borat skits from HBO's "Da Ali G Show" are offensive in any way. He's not mocking people from Kazakhstan, he's mocking ignorant Americans who have never even heard of that place and who so readily accept such a backwards, stereotypically "foreign" man.

The movie pushes that line a bit further - in many cases, we are simply laughing at Kazakhs. Borat washes his face in the toilet, for example, with no witnesses around save the camera. Cohen is no longer playing around with American attitudes towards people from far-flung parts of the world, he is simply playing a character for our amusement. I still found the movie acceptable. Borat is lovable and charming and part of his personality is being disgusting or violating taboos.

But to later find out that we may be laughing at the real villagers who in some ways inspired Borat so directly, as in bringing animals inside their house to defecate and then filming it to give others a chuckle, that crosses the line. Again, if these reports are accurate, and I have no way of knowing if they are.

I'd like to stress that this next excerpt is from a news article, not a Borat sketch.

Bogdan Moncea of Castel Film, the Bucharest-based production company that helped the filming in Romania, said the crew donated computers and TV sets to the local school and the villagers. But the locals have denied this.

Mr Staicu said: 'The school got some notebooks, but that was it. People are angry now, they feel cheated.'

It's a feeling Glod is used to. The village, like others in the Dambovita region of Romania, is populated mainly by gipsies who say they are discriminated against by the rest of the country.

Indeed, when local vice-mayor Petre Buzea was asked whether the people felt offended by Baron Cohen's film, he replied: 'They got paid so I am sure they are happy. These gipsies will even kill their own father for money.'

No one from the 20th Century Fox studio was available for comment on the villagers' claims.

You've got to love Dambovita vice-mayor Petre Buzea. Way to keep that Old World prejudice alive.

Anyway, it's unclear to me simply from this article what really happened. Perhaps Cohen's team came to the town and offered to give them lots of fabulous gifts and prizes and money in exhcange for help with the scenes, and now they just want more stuff or didn't get as much as they had wanted, so they're making a stink about it. I could definitely see that happening.

On the other hand, if these stories are true, and Cohen's team basically exploited this town and these people for the purposes of hilarity...well, nothing would happen. Americans don't care about that sort of crap, and they apparently love them some Borat, so who cares, right? Still, it would be a real shame.