A confession: I laughed from the start to finish of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." I laughed like I hadn't laughed in decades. I laughed until I couldn't breathe and tears ran down my face.
Now I've got a bad case of moviegoer's remorse. Knowing what I know now about the making of "Borat" has ruined the movie for me.
Truth to tell, my first stirrings of guilt came during the movie itself. It wasn't the film's running anti-Semitic jokes or arch take on American culture. It wasn't even the bathroom humor. All that worked to produce a rip-snorting send-up of anti-Semitism and American life. No, "Borat" turned into an increasingly guilty pleasure as it became clear that the people that Sacha Baron Cohen was making fun of weren't exactly in on the joke.
They weren't actors. They weren't even real people half-aware they were participating in a great spoof. They were real people, often kind and caring people, trying to do right by a stranger in their midst. And Baron Cohen was making sport of them unmercifully.
And audiences across the land—I among them—were just yukking it up. "Borat" was on its way to becoming the highest-grossing comedy of all time.
Am I being an overly precious ex post facto fuddy-duddy here? Am I trying to burnish my sensitivity credentials, such as they are, after laughing myself silly last Friday night? Am I bent on ruining some laugh-starved Americano's night at the movies?
Not at all. I simply have a hard time squaring my little laugh riot with what Carmiola Ionescu and Bojan Pancevski reported last weekend in a London newspaper, the Mail on Sunday.
It turns out that Baron Cohen filmed the opening and ending Kazakhstan scenes of "Borat" in the Romanian village of Glod. It's a small village of shabby huts where horses and donkeys are the only means of transportation. There's no running water or indoor plumbing. Only about a half-dozen of its inhabitants are employed, and the rest get by on welfare payments.
The Gypsies of Glod say they were led to believe the documentary would call attention to the area's raw poverty and desperation. They're now shocked to learn that they're the international subject of ridicule and humiliation. Those who aren't portrayed as abortionists, rapists and prostitutes are cast as savages.
Only when the Mail on Sunday reporters showed them the movie trailer for "Borat" did villagers see footage from the film. "Many were on the brink of tears as they saw how they were portrayed," wrote Pancevski and Ionescu.
"They never told us what they were doing but took advantage of our misfortune and poverty," said Claudia Luca, who lives next to Borat's house in the movie. "They made us look like savages, why would anyone do that?"
A good question. Maybe you have to have Baron Cohen's Cambridge education to come up with an answer.
Mocking Americans is one thing. We're the big boys on the international block. We're well-off and sturdy enough. We'll survive. But making fun of poor people in one of the globe's backwaters is a special kind of cruelty. And paying the downtrodden a few dollars a day to do things that mystify and, ultimately, humiliate them is a special kind of exploitation. Call me no fun if you like, but I'll be passing on Baron Cohen's future capers.
"They said we drink horse urine and sleep with our own kin," Spirea Ciorobea, who played the "village mechanic and abortionist," said to the Mail reporters. "You say it's comedy, but how can someone laugh at that?"
Another good question that perhaps only audiences in the civilized and sensitive West can answer.
An even better question after audiences learn just what went into the making of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."
Funny? Yeah. I laughed until I cried.
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David Reinhard is the associate editor of The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon.
David Reinhard
