So you want to star? A xcene from Carmen Meets Borat. The arrival of Sacha Baron Cohen turns a ho-hum doc into a quest for justice.
By Ed Rampell
In 1969 a "Jumping Jack Flash" lightning bolt struck while the Maysles Brothers were filming the Rolling Stones’ free outdoor concert at Altamont that transformed what could have been a routine concert film into compelling cinema verite when the documentarians captured on celluloid the Hells Angels’ vicious murder of a fan. Mercedes Stalenhoef’s documentary has the most fortuitous (for the filmmaker) real life plot twist for a nonfiction director since the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter. About 40 minutes into Stalenhoef’s rather humdrum doc about the impoverished Roma (aka “Gypsy”) village of Glod, Romania, Sacha Baron Cohen and his camera crew showed up to film 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The comedy used Glod as its insipid setting for the fictional Borat’s Kazakh hometown, mercilessly mocking them.
At the heart of Carmen Meets Borat is the issue of ethnic misrepresentation, which has plagued cinema since the celluloid stereotypes of film’s such as The Birth of A Nation. In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Civil War era epic sparked protests and boycotts by the NAACP and other outraged Blacks. In the case of Borat the indignant (and perhaps gold digging) people of Glod took their case to court with a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
In a Q&A after the LAFF screening of Carmen Meets Borat Stalenhoef said that the villagers, who did not speak English, were told that the Hollywood filmmakers were shooting a documentary. “If you make a film people should be informed of the intentions,” Stalenhoef insisted. Especially if they are depicted as figures of ridicule, rapists, abortionists and prostitutes – and paid three Euros for appearing in a movie that went on to earn boffo box office.
Truth be told, the villagers of Glod come off as unattractive, oafish, drunken louts, as the titular Carmen has pretensions of transcending her small town milieu by becoming Spanish (which she learns to speak by watching TV soap operas). This village’s cup of idiots runneth over. Along the way, the tropes of Roma as fortune telling, caravan riding, baby kidnappers are belied. The most telling moment in the doc is when Carmen’s father admits that Romanians were better off under communism, which is dealt with matter-of-factly by the filmmaker – although that’s a subject for a great documentary. In any case, it was Stalenhoef’s great piece of luck – if the villagers’ misfortune – that Borat came to town, turning an otherwise routine look at a remote hamlet into an absorbing tale of a movie maligning a people’s image.
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Truth be told, the villagers of Glod come off as unattractive, oafish, drunken louts, as the titular Carmen has pretensions of transcending her small town milieu by becoming Spanish (which she learns to speak by watching TV soap operas). This village’s cup of idiots runneth over. Along the way, the tropes of Roma as fortune telling, caravan riding, baby kidnappers are belied. The most telling moment in the doc is when Carmen’s father admits that Romanians were better off under communism, which is dealt with matter-of-factly by the filmmaker – although that’s a subject for a great documentary. In any case, it was Stalenhoef’s great piece of luck – if the villagers’ misfortune – that Borat came to town, turning an otherwise routine look at a remote hamlet into an absorbing tale of a movie maligning a people’s image.
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